Singapore built the MRT without lifts on purpose

Being right doesn't move institutions. Being counted does.

You have taken this train.

Every MRT station has a lift now. When the system opened in 1987, not one did.

That was not an oversight.

It was a decision. Argued in public. Defended in the papers. Won.

The Straits Times, November 1983. The MRT Corporation's director explains. Trains stop for "30 seconds at the most." So one has to be "reasonably agile to get in and out."

Reasonably agile.

The man arguing the other side was Ron Chandran-Dudley.

He was blind.

Two years earlier he had been elected the first world chairman of the global disability rights movement. It was founded in Singapore.

He lost.

Here's what I didn't know until recently. He'd had this fight before. And won it.

Ron was going to be a brain surgeon. He had a place to read medicine in England. Then a rugby match, 1952, and a kick to the head.

He never saw again.

In April 1953 he volunteered at the Singapore Association for the Blind. He found a system handing out white canes, badges, food, clothing and medical care. All of it decided by people who could see.

"Why can't we give the blind back their dignity?"

In June 1980, Rehabilitation International held its world congress in Winnipeg. Founded 1922. Members in a hundred countries.

Doctors. Governments. Academics. Charities.

A Swedish delegate moved an amendment. To count as an organisation of disabled people, a body had to be at least half disabled people.

Half. Not all.

It was voted down. 61 to 37.

They didn't appeal. They split off while the congress carried on down the hall, and voted to build their own.

Membership would be open to organisations "OF" handicapped people, meaning "decisive control" sat "in the hands of the handicapped."

Not a seat on the committee.

The committee.

They needed a founding congress. The budget was $240,000 and the office had $20,000 in the bank.

In Singapore, Ron mortgaged his house.

Four hundred disabled delegates from fifty-one countries arrived on 29 November 1981. On the second-to-last day the money still hadn't come, the hotel wanted $20,000, and the organisers were facing arrest.

They elected him first world chairman anyway.

His motto was four words. A Voice of Our Own.

Then Singapore announced it was building a metro.

What's a fight you won everywhere except at home?