The Bhubaneswar Smart City Limited (BSCL) has initiated a process for setting up of a one of its kind sensory park for children with special needs.
With its vision of making Bhubaneswar, a child friendly city, accessible for all, BSCL has floated the tender for the proposed park on around 0.4 acres area in Saheed Nagar locality of Ward 30, to be set up with a cost of around Rs 1 crore.
Designed by Bhubaneswar Development Authority, through its Bhubaneswar Urban Knowledge Centre (BUKC), the park for children with special needs will have all accessibility features such as ramps and facilities like sand pit and rubber flooring to curb the chances of any injuries on fall of children during play. For the visually challenged children, there will be Braille wall and sound wall along with reflexology path specially created integrating soil, grass and pebbles etc. for providing unique sensation on feet for the children.
All the play equipment in the park has been designed as per the requirement of differently-abled children. Keeping in view the love of children for swings, the park will have specially designed swings including bucket swings, wheel chair swings and wheel chair merry go round which can easily be integrated with wheel chairs. Besides, there will be ball pool and sand play table to enable children play with sand while seating on wheel chair along with specially designed shoulder builder equipment for doing shoulder / arm exercises while sitting on wheel chairs.
Providing a musical feel to the children, the park will have several sound play equipment along with drums, musical poles in order to provide the perfect play ambience for children with special needs.