The uncanny vision of a group of students of the University of Pune’s (UoP) Blind Centre has worked wonders for the city’s visually challenged students, who were struggling to find writers for their examinations. The group has created a Facebook page, Drushti-Vision, through which they tapped hundreds of people readily offering to become their buddy writers during examinations.

Not only NGOs, but people from all sectors came forward to aid the visually challenged examinees. The idea of a Facebook page thus brought in a huge database for the UoP’s Blind Centre.

The administrator of the group, Vinayak Dhoot, who himself is a postgraduate student of Political Science in the university, claims that more than 600 people have joined their FB group and as many as 250 to 300 working professionals, students and members from NGO groups have volunteered as writers for these students.

There is another group in Fergusson College called Saathi, which is also active and run by visually impaired students.” There are more than 500 students across the city colleges which are visually impaired and there used to be a time when we were not getting writers during the examination and we used to be depend on the friends from our colleges,” Dhoot says.

He says that the basic problem is that examinations are mostly concurrent so their friends also not able to help them.”Here in the university centre, majority of the visually impaired students are tech savvy. They use computers, android phones, Facebook, WhatsApp for communication. We have even downloaded a few useful audio softwares. While doing all this, we decided to create a Facebook page hoping to sort out the issue of writers,” Dhoot explains.

He further says that their Facebook page Drushti-Vision was started in January and within a few months, more than 600 people from various sections of the society joined it. Many of them volunteered to become our buddy writers.”

“In my case, one Manish Sonawane, who is working with Tata Institute of Social Science (TISS) and was on Facebook page, once called me and expressed her wish to be a writer for me. Later, she came all the way from Solapur and wrote all my the papers. I used to dictate her the answers and she would write,” says Dhoot.

Sonawane tells dna that it gives her immense pleasure to help these guys.Sunita Gupta, a professor from the Fergusson College, who looks after the Saathi Group says that employees from companies like Praj, Tech Mahindra have volunteered to become writers. They even help record the books to convert them into audio format. This way, students who are not comfortable with braille can refer to these books.
Priyanka Watane, an associate manager with Praj and coordinator for the writers’ initiative, says, “In my leisure time, I used to record books for the visually impaired students and while doing so, I came to know that there is a great crunch of writers for these students who can write their papers in the examination. After that 30 employees from our company got associated with the Fergusson College and volunteered as writers.”

Tech savvy!
While this reporter was speaking to Dhoot and his visually impaired students, he observed that these guys were using technology with great ease and did not have any barrier while browsing the social media. “I have downloaded a software called talks, which enables me to use Facebook, WhatsApp and other websites and even I can hear the news from the newspapers’s website,” one of them said. Interestingly, some sighted students audio record important paragraphs from the books and post them on WhatsApp. The blind students then hear and memorise them.

Source: DNA