By IANS,
Raipur : It’s an anxious yet exciting countdown for Congress leader and former Chhattisgarh chief minister Ajit Jogi, who is expecting to get rid of the wheelchair and become perhaps the first in India to walk with the help of robotic legs.
The 66-year-old politician, who has been confined to wheelchair since April 2004 after a near-fatal road accident, will reach India’s financial capital Mumbai next week where a team of Kiwi doctors would begin a trial with the robotic legs.
“It’s surely a very tense wait for March 16 when a team of two to three doctors will begin my trial,” Jogi told IANS.
“I am getting ready to feel the pleasure of walking on my own legs and stop being confined to the wheelchair, though it has not hampered any of my activities,” remarked Jogi who travelled and addressed more rallies than most other politicians in Chhattisgarh’s last assembly polls in November 2008.
The IAS-turned politician remarked, “The trial’s success depends on several counts and it will go on for several days, I hope to respond well and stand on my own feet.”
The buoyant Jogi has already listed out his first assignment once he gets over the wheelchair, “in Raipur I will like to take a stroll on the lawn at my residence and in Delhi I will walk on the campus of 10, Janpath (the residence of Congress chief Sonia Gandhi).”
Jogi met with with a near-fatal road accident in April 2004 during the Lok Sabha campaign in Chhattisgarh while he was contesting poll as the Congress candidate from Mahasamund constituency against V.C. Shukla, who was then a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) nominee.
Jogi at that time defeated Shukla on his home turf by over 100,000 votes.
Jogi said doctors of New Zealand-based Rex Bionics Limited had earlier said the trial would be undertaken in Chhattisgarh capital Raipur, but later shifted the venue due to the fear of Maoists.