For those who grew up in the age before cable television when programmes aired on Doordarshan were the stuff that Sunday afternoons were made of, news broadcast in sign language would always remain etched in their minds.

Fast forward two decades later, the communication intended for the benefit of the hearing impaired is hard to come by on our television channels. Yet another sign of a society that excludes the concept of ‘inclusion', activists would concur.

Lack of awareness

Rekha Goyal, 23, lost her sight due to chickenpox when she was just three. But the fighter that she is, she educated herself at one of the best institutions and found employment in a bank.

With the help of her post-graduate education, and computer and English language skills learnt at the Venu Institute of Universal Education (VIUE), many visually impaired people like Goyal as well as those with other physical handicaps are successfully defying the stereotype that the physically challenged cannot be employed in regular jobs.

There was a ray of hope for differently-abled people in India on Monday when President Pratibha Devisingh Patil announced a separate Department of Disability Affairs in her speech on the first day of the Budget session of Parliament.The Ministry of Civil Aviation also decided to review the existing guidelines for persons with special needs in the wake of a spate of incidents of discrimination faced by them at airports across the country.

The five visually-impaired children appearing for the SSLC examination in the city, two girls and three boys, have more than blindness to overcome.

These children, who attend classes with normal children in regular schools like Cotton Hill and SMV School, are not provided any special tuition.

Making things more difficult for these students, they have not been given Braille-enabled textbooks this year.

Despite staggering figures that point towards the growing unemployability rate among the disabled, some NGOs and Government     organisations are trying to better the situation by offering such people a platform to perform.On the eve of the World Disabled Day,   Sangeeta Yadav tells you about the available opportunities

Visually challenged people across the country will no longer have to rely on radio or TV to catch up on national and international news. A fortnightly Hindi newspaper in Braille, Drishti (vision), will soon be available to more than 20,000 readers through 325 institutions working with the blind.

“There is no greater joy than reading whether you have sight or not. And this is a great way to empower and enlighten the blind through education and entertainment,” said K Ramakrishna, secretary general, National Association for the Blind (NAB).

Alarmed that only 25 per cent of the posts reserved for the physically-challenged in Class-I category government jobs have been filled up owing to non-availability and non-suitability of candidates, the Himachal High Court on Wednesday directed the state government and Public Service Commission to work on alternatives to provide equal opportunities to the disabled.

A visually impaired man became the first person with a disability to sit on the Jakarta Transportation Council as the capital swore in 15 new council members on Tuesday.

Jaka Ahmad, 36, from the Jakarta chapter of the Indonesian Association for the Visually Impaired (Pertuni), said that he would fight for the rights of all people with disabilities during his two-year term as a member of the council known as DTKJ.