Vaishali Gopnarayan, a twenty-two-year-old from a small village in Akola, Maharashtra, was born with low vision due to a genetic condition that also affected her mother and brother. Her father, a daily wage laborer, struggled to provide for the family, limiting Vaishali’s access to education.
Despite the challenges, Vaishali attended a special school for the blind, mastering Braille and essential mobility skills. However, the lack of advanced educational opportunities in her district prompted a bold decision—she moved to Mumbai to pursue higher education.

Twenty-five-year-old Pramod Kumar was born sighted into a farmer family in Fatehpur district of Uttar Pradesh. At the age of five, Pramod had a reaction to some medicine that resulted in vision loss. For the next several years, his parents kept shopping for medical solutions to fix his eyesight but to no avail. 
During this time, Pramod didn’t go to school and was confined to his home. As he grew older, the parents thought of educating him to some degree so he could get a job to self-sustain. Pramod managed to complete Class X and XII through open schooling. 

Twenty-eight-year-old Dr. Gauri Vivekanand Swami, born to government teacher parents in Latur, Maharashtra, faced her first vision challenge at age six with Amblyopia and myopia in her left eye. Despite early treatments at L.V. Prasad Eye Institute in Hyderabad, complete recovery remained elusive. Inspired by her grandfather, a science teacher, she pursued medicine at Vilasrao Deshmukh Government Medical College.
 

Twenty-five-year-old Vidyasagar hails from Satna district in Madhya Pradesh. He was born with a degenerating eye condition call Retinitis Pigmentosa, which results in gradual sight loss. He belongs to a low income family, where his father works as a daily wage labourer to support the wife and their three children. 

Twenty-seven-year-old Shrikant Pandey resides with his family in Bastar, Chhattisgarh. His father runs a cosmetics shop and his brother operates a mobile store, both small businesses taking care of the family’s needs. 
Born blind, Shrikant studied in a mainstream school up till Class 5. But like any other blind student, the lack of accessible teaching method and study material made it very hard for Shrikant to acquire any knowledge studying alongside sighted kids. He couldn’t make it to Class 6 and was asked to shift to a special school in Jagdalpur.