For the Disabled, by the Disabled
By Sarita Rani, in Bangalore and Meghna Sharma, in New Delhi
With no money and little IT expertise, Mahantesh has
built Samarthanam Trust for the disabled?an organization
that teaches computer basics to the blind.
G K Mahantesh is an MA, MPhil in English Literature
and is almost completely blind. He went through school,
college and an attempt at the civil services by having
friends record lessons on audiocassettes. His civil services
syllabus alone consisted of 300 cassettes for which he
scrimped and saved and scraped. So one day Mahantesh
and a couple of his friends going through the same problem
decided to pool in money and buy blank cassettes for
recording textbooks for younger children.
From
there, the project has grown into a trust called the
Samarthanam Trust for the Disabled,
where, among
other things, Mahantesh and a few volunteers?some sighted,
some blind, teach computer basics to blind students.
Mindtree promoter Ashok Soota, is one of its trustees.
All the infrastructure at Bangalore is donated?from PCs
to a scanner and a printer. They download a demo version
of screen-reading software from the Net called JAWS for
Windows every 45 minutes because they don’t have
the 800 dollars required to buy it outright. Yet, they
are willing to go further?from using computers as a tool
for the blind to professional software training. “We
actually want someone from the industry to tell us what
our students need to be taught. We can do that if we
are guided,” says Mahantesh. But he isn’t.
One
of the biggest obstacles to increased employability
of the disabled in high-end, high-paying
jobs in the
IT sector is lack of training. Most training efforts
are sheer will-driven efforts like Mahantesh's?with no
money and little IT expertise. Some of these NGOs need
more basic things: hardware. While upgrading systems,
a lot of companies donate old PCs to schools, but mostly,
these special needs schools get left out. “Why
can’t the large corporate houses, donate their
old and unused computers to such NGOs?” says Col
P Kapoor, executive secretary, Blind Relief association.
Which is not to say that the organized sector has no
initiatives in this area at all. There are a few organizations
like the FORE foundation for education in Mumbai?an organization
of IT professionals?who collect old machines, get them
serviced if required, and donate them to schools, colleges
and institutions supporting the handicapped. Companies
like NIIT have at various times contributed some time,
money or technology to NGOs in this area.
Yet IT training needs somehow have never been the focus.
Many leading training institutes, like the rest of the
industry, lack basic equal access facilities like ramps
and restrooms for the disabled. Though some of them do
offer course discounts.
When
the numbers are taken, however, there are only a handful
of schools throughout the
country that provide
IT training for the disabled with any degree of organization
and seriousness. Among them are the Technology Lab at
the National Association for the Blind (which teaches
computer basics, some application software packages,
web designing and some languages); the Sophia Opportunity
School at Bangalore (which runs a program for mentally
challenged children at a center set up with help from
Microsoft); The Blind Relief Association’s computer
education cell (set up by the Times of India Group).
These are, again, isolated initiatives and quite obviously
not enough. If the employability needs of the disabled
have to be addressed, training is one of the most crucial
issues that will have to be tackled first.
Source: DATAQUEST
Issue: Dated April 30, 2001
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