-Albert Einstein, George Washington, Beethoven, Helen Keller, Thomas Edison, Graham Bell — all faced one form of disability or the other. As a new academic session has started in colleges, we need to remind ourselves of this fact in order to look at the differently abled from an alternative perspective, says ANANYA BORGOHAIN
My advice to other disabled people would be, concentrate on things your disability doesn’t prevent you from doing well, and don’t regret the things it interferes with. Don’t be disabled in spirit as well as physically — Stephen Hawking
The Disability Bill of 2014 was introduced in the Rajya Sabha on February 7, 2014, by Mallikarjun Kharge, the then Minister of Social Justice and Empowerment. The Bill repeals the Persons with Disabilities (Equal Opportunities Protection of Rights and Full Participation) Act of 1995. In terms of employment too, the Disability Act clearly states:
“At least 5 per cent of the vacancies are to be filled by persons or class of persons with at least 40 per cent of any of the disabilities. Of this, one per cent shall be reserved for persons with (i) blindness and low vision; (ii) hearing and speech impairment; (iii) locomotor disability; (iv) autism, intellectual disability and mental illness; and (v) multiple disabilities. The Bill provides that the reservation has to be computed on the basis of total number of vacancies in the strength of a cadre. The Government may exempt any establishment from this provision.”

It has since been subjected to much scrutiny and critique, most of which unfortunately bordered on harsh criticism. Is the Bill going to reinforce vulnerability upon the differently abled? Or does it have an accommodating vision for them? Either way, a fundamental right of the ‘disabled’ is the right to indiscriminate education. But as the academic session starts, how prepared are the Indian universities to accommodate the differently abled?

According to the Ministry of Home Affairs’ official website, Census 2001 had revealed that over 21 million people in India suffer from one or the other kind of disability. Among the five types of disabilities on which data has been collected, disability in seeing at 48.5 per cent emerges as the top category. Others in sequence are: movement (27.9 per cent), mental (10.3 per cent), speech (7.5 per cent), and hearing (5.8 per cent).

How does a differently abled student match up to the calibre of a ‘normal’ student then? Are sufficient provisions taken and training imparted to facilitate the disabled? Since Delhi is currently under the President’s rule, its Budget was presented in Parliament a couple of weeks ago. This Rs36,776-crore Budget had a multi-specialty hospital, which will come up in Rohini, and 50 dialysis centres in different parts of NCR as a part of its highlights. Besides, Rs2,483 crore was allocated to Education and Rs3,472 crore to the transport sector. New schemes for the disabled will be launched and 15 new Braille presses are to be set up. All these sectors mentioned above cater to the concerns of a differently abled citizen. However, the universities have still not got over their insensitivity towards such students. Most libraries do not have provisions for them to reach higher shelves and many lack adequate reading material for them. Worse, collective discorn towards them was recently seen in a school for such children in Hyderabad recently, where a blind child was mercilessly thrashed by a faculty member, who ironically, was visually impaired himself.

The Equal Opportunity Cell (EOC) of Delhi University strives to establish equal educational facilities for all, centering on the differently abled. It encourages differently abled students by getting in touch with them directly or through other institutions. When the time comes, employment opportunities are furnished to the students as well. Following the enactment of the Persons with Disability Bill, provision has been made for a 3 per cent reservation for admission of differently abled students as well as appointment of teaching and non-teaching staff in the university system. However, a large number of differently abled students hesitate to join the university, anticipating inapt facilities in the teaching and learning process. Arathy Manoharan, who is trained in teaching deaf students, is currently pursuing her Masters in Deaf Education in McDaniel, US, says, “Most deaf children are born to parents who can hear and do not know how to sign. Unless a hearing test is given in the hospital, parents may not know that their children are deaf or hard of hearing until they are 3 years old. By the time most Indian deaf children arrive at school, they are behind their peers.

“Most of these deaf schools let students copy during exams so that they somehow or the other graduate from school. Indian Universities need to ensure that qualified Indian Sign Language (ISL)/English/Hindi educational interpreters are hired to provide access to their students. Students need to be able to conveniently use these services by getting in touch with a centralised office that provides support services to students.”

The EOC of Delhi University seeks to generate resources to provide tuition assistance, special equipment, educational counselling, and trained readers and writers to the differently abled. DU also allows for a 5 per cent relaxation in the eligibility criteria for these students, except for courses where they have to take entrance tests. In such cases, the same regulations apply to all.
It is estimated that about 300-350 differently abled students get registered in formal streams in different courses annually. The University Health Centre determines the degree of impairment of differently abled students. The EOC offers courses in BEd, physiotherapy, post-graduate diploma in special education etc, has facilities such as Braille library and an audio book Resource Centre, organises health check-up camps, celebrates Louis Braille’s anniversary and World Disability Day, and also holds annual sports meets.

Officer on Special Duty of the EOC, Dr Bipin Tiwari recalls, “I went to ask some students if they had studied with any physically challenged student or have attempted to help such students in any manner ever. I was shocked to hear a girl from the group say, ‘Hume unse kya matlab?

(Why should that bother us?)’. We at the EOC in DU realise the pressing need to sensitise students about the ones with disabilities.”
Interestingly, it is not always these ‘other’ students who need to understand the gravity of the situation. Sometimes, the differently abled tend to overlook their personal challenges too.

“Dyslexic students do not want to be identified as dyslexic. They come to us acknowledging that they are dyslexic but don’t want to be officially identified as one. That is why there is no data on such students. These students perform well. In fact, in many cases it’s seen that they perform better than other students. They participate in various extra-curricular activities and annual fests. They also go for college trips along with other students. DU is probably the first university in the world which had taken a group of differently abled students for an educational expedition to King’s College, London, and the University of Edinburgh, Scotland,” says Tiwari, adding, “we should not treat them as special, but as regular students”.

He believes that though DU is not fully equipped to solve all problems of such students, it is a lot better than many colleges in India. The university is striving to create a better environment for such students with a new step each day.

A teacher at the Faculty of Law, Delhi University, Shakti Kumar Aggarwal, says the private sector doesn’t recruit differently abled students mostly because none of them are technologically equipped enough. A graduate from Hindu College, Aggarwal is visually challenged himself. “The differently abled students mostly go into the public sector. Orthopedically challenged students require proper elevated paths for easier

movement, and visually challenged students need tactile paths or assistive technologies. All DU colleges are equipped as far as infrastructure is concerned. But more assistive technologies are being brought in every day,” he says.

However, he does add, “The buildings and colleges are infrastructurally equipped, but certain places still remain extremely risky for people with disabilities. The Faculty of Law is one of the most dangerous buildings and a student had an accident on the campus last year.” In 2012, DU had reportedly been granted over Rs3 crore to make the campus friendlier for students with challenges. But to a large extent it still has to be perfectly accessible to many. There is dearth of water as well as toilet facilities on the campus for all. These being basic amenities, one can only imagine the crises that the disabled students may face.

However, there also seems to be a silver lining. Libraries are reportedly well-equipped with reading machines for the differently abled students with hearing impairment. Autistic students are also included there. All students are accommodated in the same class in regular colleges of the university, and no special syllabus/treatment is regarded for students with disabilities. The university conducts workshops for teachers as well to make it easier for them to teach such students.

In spite of the fact that occasional cases of discrimination against such students are seen, some of them have been faring inspiringly. A Canada-based entrepreneur, Samarth Chandola, recounts, “When I was in Ramjas College around five years ago, there was a visually challenged student in my class. I had advised him to record the lectures and play them on a laptop to study. I would also help him transfer the recordings to his laptop so that he could repeat them at home and study instead of taking down notes in class. I am happy that with time, he familiarised himself and began to be comfortable with technology and is today working as a software accessibility testing engineer in a company. I hear he is soon getting married too.”

The technical universities - though not all of the lot - seem to have the best prepared premises to accommodate the differently abled. In March this year, the National Centre for Promotion of Employment for Disabled People (NCPEDP) had judged IIM-Bangalore as the best disabled-friendly Indian institute. And very recently, an IIT-Delhi student’s project on increasing Braille display for the visually impaired won the top award in a national innovation contest held in Thiruvananthapuram. But comparatively, universities across the country have a long way to go to offer even remote assurance. Every university is required to have an Equal Opportunity Cell. Moreover, they are expected to be active this time of the year when classes have commenced in many universities. However, calls made to Lucknow University as well as Kakatiya University in Warangal were not received.

Banaras Hindu University - one of the oldest and renowned universities in the country - does have an Equal Opportunity Cell, but the people in it seem to be oblivious of it! Two calls to the officials whose contact details were listed under the website’s Equal Opportunity Cell were met with: “Am I really a part of the Equal Opportunity Cell? I really don’t know what cell this is.”

This is not really anything surprising. Under conditions of anonymity, a deaf citizen laments, “I went to this college for the differently abled which also had deaf students. The very first day I realised that neither the teachers taught in sign language nor there was an interpreter available. They completely ignored us and did not conduct special classes for us too. I was stuck there till my diploma course was over because there was no other deaf college in India.” She adds, “It becomes tougher to communicate via emails or other forms of writing. In India, colleges may have enough or more facilities for the blind, or for the physically handicapped but not for the deaf.”
Aqil Chinoy works as an Assistant General Manager of Information Technology at a company which specialises as marine suppliers. He specialises in computer management, web-app management, graphic design and so on, and is deaf too. He, along with his brother, also runs a small company called Inspirealive which concerns web technology. All the workers in his firm are deaf people. He says, “I went to a famous college at Vile Parle for 11th and 12th std. Unlike my hearing high school where a classroom consisted of 30 students, I found myself in a class of 50 to 60 students and the level of teachers’ attention to my hearing-impairment was very low. In the college, the front rows of seats were reserved for female and the rest for male students. From the back, I was not able to see the professor’s lipreading clearly and hence I was not able to follow a single word. I left my studies midway and left for the US to pursue higher studies.

“When I went abroad to Gallaudet University, the world changed. For the first time, I was able to interact with the professors, understand every word of their lecture, ask them questions directly and get answers likewise. This level of education was carried out in American Sign Language (ASL) which consists of finger-spelling, hand-movements, signs, gestures, etc. which is the mother tongue of the deaf people.  Moreover, being in the classroom with other 10-20 students seated in a “C” shaped row, we were able to see each other without swinging our necks. The ways that the professors imparted their education using technology as visual aids at Gallaudet were so great, that we were able to learn at a good pace.”

Both Arathy and Aqil emphasise upon the need of the Indian Universities to ensure that qualified ISL/English/Hindi educational interpreters are hired to provide access to their students. While Aqil stresses on the requirement of visual aid, powerpoint representation and courses on deaf people to propagate familiarity towards their condition, Arathy adds, “If educators use powerpoint presentations during their lecture, not only the deaf students, but others can also be able to make better notes. Due to the lack of bilingual education, written language may be a struggle for the brightest of the deaf students. Students should be provided support in editing the wording (not the content) of their assignments before submission. Indian Sign Language clubs can be set up so that qualified ISL teachers can teach ISL to hearing students at the university who can then ensure that Deaf students at the university feel welcome.

Universities need to set up Bachelors, Masters and Doctoral level programs in Indian Sign Language, Interpreting, Deaf Studies (understanding the Deaf community as a language minority), etc. Most importantly, no deaf student would feel truly welcome at a university unless they see deaf faculty as respected members of the campus community.”
Along with that, the Equal Opportunity Cells in universities need to cultivate a way more sincere attitude towards these students. Libraries need to build pathways for them and also make arrangements for the wheelchair bound to pick books from any corner. More Braille libraries need to be set up. Concern and respect towards the differently abled need to be cultivated in our collective conscience.

SOURCE: Daily Pioneer