Implementation of the 'Calaberg Plan' is halted; Minister Medri: Not included in the budget

The Minister of Cooperatives, Labor, and Social Welfare of the Pezeshkian government announced that the implementation of the Calaberg plan is 'canceled' because no 'line item' has been allocated in the 1403 budget for its execution. According to the state-run news agency Tasnim, Ahmad Medri emphasized that there is no funding for the Calaberg plan in next year's budget bill, and therefore, the plan will not be implemented. It is worth mentioning that the Calaberg system allows low-income groups to purchase essential goods from specified stores using government or subsidized credits. This senior government official claimed that the law on the rights of persons with disabilities mandates that 3% of job opportunities in executive agencies be allocated to individuals with disabilities. However, Medri stressed that 'its implementation has not been complete in some institutions' and claimed that 'the Welfare Organization is taking necessary actions to fully implement this law.' The statements by the minister of the fourteenth government of the Islamic Republic regarding the lack of budget allocation for the Calaberg plan next year indicate a shift in the Pezeshkian government's approach to implementing supportive policies for individuals with disabilities and low-income groups. Previously, the Ilna news agency reported, citing 'Koulivand, the representative of retired disabled individuals and an activist for disability rights,' that 'the pension of a person with a disability is about 970,000 tomans! This means that the pension of a disabled individual has not yet reached one million tomans.' Additionally, according to the state-run news agency Irna, the pensions for two-person households are 1,420,000 tomans, three-person households 2,000,000 tomans, four-person households 2,550,000 tomans, and five-person households and above 3,150,000 tomans. This state-run news agency wrote on the first of Aban that 'the government intends to increase the pensions of beneficiaries under the coverage of the Imam Khomeini Relief Foundation and the Welfare Organization by 20%, in line with the increase in employee salaries next year.' According to Ilna, Koulivand added that 'we have more than 600,000 severely and very severely disabled individuals without jobs' who are covered by the disability rights law, but this law is not being implemented. He pointed out that 'the Welfare Organization provides only 270,000 tomans to 240,000 individuals instead of 600,000. This means that now, when the base salary is 7.5 million tomans, the basic salary has been denied to nearly one million disabled individuals.' In recent years, individuals with disabilities have repeatedly held protests in various cities across Iran. In this context, today the Ilna news agency reported again that the problem of repeated delays in the payment of pensions to disabled individuals and the mismatch of the amounts paid with what is determined in Article 27 of the Disability Rights Law, despite repeated protests, remains unresolved. In June of this year, a number of 'independent activists' wrote a letter to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, emphasizing the indifference of Iranian government officials towards the rights of citizens with disabilities, referring to the presence of the head of the Welfare Organization of the Islamic Republic at the seventeenth conference of this international body.