Mabusabu was born into a poor family in Nandhigrama village of Bellary which lacked awareness on how to raise a blind child. This had left Mabusabu confined to his home, isolating him from the outside world and denying him access to mainstream education.

In 2011, a timid young girl called the Eyeway Helpdesk from Kashmir. She asked several questions pertaining to vision impairment but was wary of giving out any personal details. Only several calls later did we figure that Qurat Khan suffered from gradual vision loss due to Retinitis Pigmentosa. Studying in Class 12, she explained her struggles in the classroom with the printed syllabus.

Naseer Rashid lost his eye sight in an accident when he was three. A resident of the conflict ridden state of Jammu and Kashmir, where sighted students struggle to access mainstream education, Naseer’s family was unaware of ways to raise their blind child.

The Eyeway Helpdesk receives 1500 to 2000 calls a month from visually impaired people across India. Most callers ask for opportunities of education and employment, government provisions and guidelines, aids and appliances, anything that will enable them to lead an independent life.

Prabhsimran Singh visited the Eyeway Helpdesk in Delhi along with his mother in the year 2018 seeking career guidance. The twenty-five-year-old from Gurugram, Haryana is visually impaired since his childhood and has completed his BA (H) in Hindi from Delhi University. Born into a middle-class family, his father is a businessman and mother is a private school teacher. Growing up he felt overprotected by his mother, who also constantly compared him to other children in the family. This left him under-confident.