New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Wednesday asked the Centre to frame a policy on rehabilitation of mental asylum inmates considered to be cured.
This comes with rising cases of cured patients of mental asylum being left at the mercy of the institutions after being shunned by their families.
A bench of Chief Justice of India J.S. Khehar, Justice Dhananjaya Y. Chandrachud and Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul granted the Centre eight weeks to frame a policy. They were also asked to submit policy to the bench for review of what measures have been planned for the “thousands of cured mental patients who are still languishing in the asylums”.
Earlier this week, a bench headed by Khehar said that it favoured a uniform policy for the entire country to deal with the mentally challenged. It also issued a notice to the Union Health Ministry stating that since treatment of the mentally challenged is in the concurrent list of the Constitution, the Centre had the authority to frame norms and rules.
The case was taken up after a Public Interest Litigation petition was filed by Gaurav Kumar Bansal to find out the number of cured patients still languishing in asylums across the country.
Speaking to News18, Bansal said there are about 43 mental hospitals in the country which houses almost 8,000 to 10,000 patients.
“The RTI reply revealed that about 1,000 patients were cured since the last 40 years but were abandoned by their families. I demanded that a rehabilitation scheme should be set up for them. Even they deserve a chance to live their life,” he said.
When the case came up last year, SC had observed that the issue was a serious one, and that cured persons should not be allowed to live in mental hospitals.
Recent February 2017 reports indicated towards a similar continuing trend where over 911 patients housed in four state-run mental hospitals in Maharashtra were forced to live at the mental asylums even after being cured, as they had been shunned by their families.
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