The po­ten­tial for ar­ti­fi­cial limbs to re­turn peo­ple to pro­duc­tive ca­pac­i­ty got a big ad­ver­tise­ment in May 2012 when triple-am­putee ath­lete Ra­jesh Dur­bal vis­it­ed Trinidad and To­ba­go.Mr Dur­bal, whose par­ents are from this coun­try, has par­tic­i­pat­ed in the Iron Man world Triathlon."Sweat," he said on his ar­rival in Trinidad, "is noth­ing com­pared to your tears."

The gov­ern­ment's new plan to pro­vide 300 pros­the­ses per year to cit­i­zens is a project with which it's dif­fi­cult to find fault.In No­vem­ber 2012, speak­ing at the launch of Ch­agua­nas-based pros­thet­ics man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­ny Caribbean Med­ical So­lu­tions, Min­is­ter of the Peo­ple and So­cial De­vel­op­ment, Dr Glenn Ra­mad­hars­ingh lament­ed the rate of di­a­betes re­lat­ed am­pu­ta­tions in T&T.

Ac­cord­ing to Dr Ra­mad­hars­ingh, 140,000 peo­ple man­age di­a­betes in the coun­try, a sta­tis­tic he de­scribed as "alarm­ing." The Health Min­istry es­ti­mates that 400 peo­ple lose limbs an­nu­al­ly.

The pro­gramme, with a bud­get of $12 mil­lion, will be man­aged as one-off grants with fund­ing set at $40,000 per per­son with ex­cep­tion­al cas­es al­lowed a ceil­ing of $100,000. Dr Ra­mad­hars­ingh ex­plained that "pri­vate par­ties," which he de­clined to name, would sup­ply pros­thet­ics to the Min­istry at re­duced cost, rang­ing be­tween US$2,000 and $5,000, a sig­nif­i­cant drop from the nor­mal price of US$20,000 and up for a sin­gle limb.

The So­cial De­vel­op­ment Min­is­ter al­so an­nounced a so­cial men­tors pro­gramme de­signed to in­spire the dis­abled, with a fo­cus on the coun­try's 5,000 dis­abled chil­dren. Per­sons iden­ti­fied by schools, groups, or­gan­i­sa­tions and clubs as men­tors would be el­i­gi­ble for one-time grant of $10,000 and a month­ly stipend of $3,500 for the next two years.

This pro­gramme will be over­seen by the min­istry's dis­abil­i­ty sec­tion, which will make ap­pro­pri­ate sug­ges­tions to the Min­is­ter. Both pro­grammes cast some wel­come and over­due light on the chal­lenges fac­ing the dis­abled in T&T, and will serve to im­prove their lot if man­aged ef­fec­tive­ly.Do these projects go far enough? Are they sus­tain­able?Both pro­grammes feel too much like gov­ern­ment hand­out pro­grammes, though they have iden­ti­fied crit­i­cal so­cial needs.

Mr Ra­mad­hars­ingh's plan will dra­mat­i­cal­ly im­prove the sup­ply or ar­ti­fi­cial limbs to per­sons un­able to af­ford them, but has he con­sid­ered how these limbs will be kept func­tion­al through­out their use­ful life?Per­haps part of the $12 mil­lion spend pro­posed for the pur­chase of pros­thet­ics should be used to en­cour­age the growth of a re­pair and ser­vice in­dus­try for de­vices that might, with good for­tune, lead in­no­va­tors to cre­ate their own ver­sions of such prod­ucts some­where fur­ther down the road.

While re­ward­ing ex­ist­ing so­cial men­tors for their in­vest­ment of time and en­er­gy is a flat­ter­ing project, there needs to be more work done on en­cour­ag­ing the de­vel­op­ment and en­gage­ment of more per­sons who might be in­ter­est­ed in par­tic­i­pat­ing in such mo­ti­va­tion­al projects.The So­cial De­vel­op­ment Min­is­ter's heart is in the right place on these projects, he just needs to en­sure that his think­ing is equal­ly sound in the fol­low through on these ini­tia­tives.