Within minutes of the tele-conversation, her customers are convinced into buying a mobile or a landline connection. Her enticing voice has listeners hooked on. So much so, that “some continue to talk, to just listen to my voice, wasting my time and theirs! I cut the calls when they do this,” says Alisha (not her real name).

Alisha is visually impaired. As a tele-caller, she handles about 300 calls a day. She is expected to meet demanding deadlines and customer targets. But she is not complaining because her face brightens up at the mention of the word ‘call’. JAWS, a screen-reading software, facilitates her work.

Her superiors are impressed by her performance. “She performs 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.

The Alisha story is also representative of the gradual, yet growing change that corporate India is undergoing — of making the best use of abilities of ‘disabled’ people, of accepting the visually impaired like Alisha for mainstream employment and placing them on the same bandwidth as ‘the abled’.

The mettle Alisha displays as she races against deadlines and achieves ‘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.

Alisha returns home, tired, yet strangely contended. The difference: she’s dreaming big. Better jobs, better degrees, better life…even an overseas trip in the days to come! And why not?