Five Gardens fails disability audit, residents say proposed changes must be heritage-sensitive

Jasmina Khanna notes the countless times she has had to be lifted in her wheelchair to find a comfortable spot on a beach or in a garden. “It's a matter of my dignity,” said Khanna, who is wheelchair-bound due to cerebral palsy.

- Sabah Virani

And this, she says, is what happens at Five Gardens, a heritage enclave and green haven in the Dadar Parsi Colony. “The ride on the footpath is like a roller-coaster ride for me.”

Khanna was speaking while presenting her disability audit on Five Gardens on Tuesday. She was accompanied by Sanket Khadilkar, her physiotherapist and co-founder of the NGO ‘Access to Hope, and other people with other disabilities. As part of the audit, the group did a walkthrough, to assess how disability friendly the precinct was.

“We encountered our first problem as soon as we got to Five Gardens; there were no ramps, or the ramps were unusable,” said Khadilkar.

“The footpaths themselves, made of basalt stone, have uneven surfaces, so much so that Jasmina's wheelchair would often come to a dead stop, and the only thing stopping her from falling, face first, was her belt,” he said.