India, March 18 -- A parliamentary standing committee has stressed the need to resolve bottlenecks in medical assessments of people with disabilities (PwDs), recommending the inclusion of private medical professionals to expedite their certification, and highlighted the delay in setting up of a national university on disability studies in Assam, which was announced a decade ago.

The Standing Committee on Social Justice and Empowerment, in its report tabled in the Lok Sabha on Monday, pointed out that while the Unique Disability ID (UDID) project - aimed at providing comprehensive and verifiable identity cards to PwDs to access government benefits - has successfully generated around 11.8 million cards, its implementation continues to face...