August 2008

About Free2Wheel

By Shivani Gupta, Director, AccessAbility

Free2Wheel by AccessAbility is a first of its kind initiative in India focused at putting India on the international travel map for disabled tourists. It is aimed at precipitating the need for promoting inclusive practices in the travel and hospitality sectors. The online version at www.Free2Wheel.co.in (External Link) has over 1700 sites listings of places of interest in Delhi and NCR.

The portal provides an easy to use interface and a detailed overview of the status of wheelchair accessibility for each listed place, besides providing other relevant information to travelers like type of place (budget and star hotels, shopping malls, historical monuments, restaurants/bars/pubs/nightclubs, cafe's, currency exchange counters, tourist information centres etc.) their timings, estimated charges (if any), parking facilities etc.

I chose Delhi as the city to start with for this travel guide as I have lived in Delhi all my life - both as a disabled and as a nondisabled person. Delhi is my city and I love it for its good as well as bad points. After I became disabled it suddenly became extremely difficult to join my peers in going out for fun. There have been several times when I dropped out of a social outing with friends just imagining how difficult it would be for them to negotiate my wheelchair through the inaccessible terrains of the city, only to realize much later that there were probably just two steps to get in, which would have been easily managed with the help of my friends.

There have been so many times when I have tried calling the venue in advance to know about the accessibility of the place and have always lost my head trying to make them understand the simple question I am asking them - "I am on a wheelchair, how many steps do you have at your entrance?".