Putin urges action to help disabled

The Chernobyl disaster has left many disabled

By Nikolai Gorshkov BBC correspondent, Moscow

The Russian President, Vladimir Putin has ordered his ministers to come up with proposals to improve the lives of Russia's 11 million disabled people.

He met the leaders of several Russian societies looking after the blind, the hard-of-hearing, the Afghan war veterans and the victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

The system needs changing to help children like Marina

Addressing his audience, President Putin spoke through a sign language interpreter.

Not everyone in the auditorium was able to hear, or indeed, see him.

One in every 10 Russians has a disability and their numbers are steadily growing.

They used to be the outcasts of the Soviet society, too ashamed to be seen in public, which would not want to know of their existence.

Change impetus

Now, President Putin wants this to change.

To a considerable extent, he told his audience, a society is judged by its attitude towards the disabled.

"We still have a long way to go in this respect," Mr Putin said.

Putin wants to remove the Soviet stigma

He was presented with a list of complaints from the disabled. Their worry is that the new Russian tax code has done away with tax breaks and incentives, granted to companies employing staff with disabilities.

The system was abused by unscrupulous directors who sold off their preferential quotas to other businesses.

Integration

It needed shaking up, but the complete withdrawal of tax breaks, the head of the Russian Society for the Blind told President Putin, would completely shut down enterprises run and staffed by the disabled.

Their overheads are higher, and the productivity of labour is lower than in the mainstream economy.

Mr Putin has urged the government to come up with new exemptions for such companies, before the end of the current tax year.

But the main concern of Russia's eleven million disabled is not fiscal - they long to be integrated into the society and be treated as equals.