Stakeholders emphasize empowering leprosy-affected citizens through social security and self-reliance

KATHMANDU: Stakeholders have emphasized that the state must establish leprosy-affected individuals as self-reliant, independent, and capable citizens in society through social security mechanisms that enable them to generate income.

At a program organized today in Kathmandu by the Nepal Law Society, Association for Idea Nepal, Leprosy Relief Association, National Welfare Association of Leprosy Affected, and Rehabilitation, Empowerment and Development Nepal, participants stated that the government must ensure programs and an environment that allow social security allowance recipients to become economically productive. 

Former Chief Justice Kalyan Shrestha stated that the government should make necessary legal arrangements considering how leprosy-affected individuals suffer damage to their self-respect when separated from education, health, employment, family, and society. “Due to a weak understanding of leprosy in Nepali society, victims face a situation where they are alienated from family, property, and society, which is a distorted aspect of modern society,” Shrestha said. “The state must provide leprosy-affected people with social justice and capacity building rather than sympathy and pity.”