Call me Alisha. I can’t reveal my real name,” she says, as she speaks on the mobile with élan. At 24, she is as charming as Indipop singer Alisha Chinai. Her listeners are only too happy to hear a sweet voice enticing them for a mobile or landline connection.In just three minutes, Alisha manages to get a customer. What’s more, she handles 300 such calls a day though not all are ‘fruitful’. This camera shy Alisha’s face lights up when you talk ‘calls’.

Though visually impaired, you cannot but notice it till you get into a conversation with her. She moves about being as mobile as the ‘visually abled’ would.

The Alisha story is also representative the gradual, yet growing change that corporate India is undergoing — of making the best use of available abilities among the ‘disabled’. Of accepting the visually impaired like Alisha for mainstream employment as it cashes in on the telecom boom and placing them on the same bandwidth as ‘the abled’, like the it industry that’s opening its doors too.

Therefore, if jaws software helps blind techies, tele-callers have it in their voice. And Alisha is cashing in on that.

She outdoes her ‘normal’ counterparts at work. “Her performance is 30 percent better than ‘abled’ tele-callers,” says Vinod Thimmaiah, Managing Director of Third Wave Tata Teleservices. The firm is a franchisee outsourcing telemarketing for Tata Indicom, the telecom major.

However, it’s not easy, considering mad competition pushing ites employees up the wall these days. There are days which are not easy for her. You notice her irritability when customers talk longer than required. “Some continue to talk just to listen to my voice, wasting my time and theirs. I cut the calls when they do this,” says Alisha.

For Alisha, every morning is a battle to be won. Her day begins with finishing the morning chores. “My mother is no more. So I manage the kitchen,” she says.

The mettle Alisha displays as she races against deadlines and ‘customer targets’ proves just that. For this, she braves crowded bus stops, potholed roads, damaged pavements and traffic jams to travel from the far corner of Bangalore where her home is . With the day’s work over, Alisha returns home, tired, yet strangely contended. Come next morning and it’s business as usual. The difference: she’s dreaming big. Better jobs, better degrees, better life…even an overseas trip in the days to come! And why not?