Pankaj Ghosal remembers the time, the exact day and date when his parents took him to visit Akshardham. "It was November11, 2010, a Thursday. We spent the entire day there," he recalls. It was the first time he had visited a place of historical importance. But being visually impaired, he understood little about the temple's grandeur or beauty. For him, visiting the temple was no different from visiting the neighborhood mall. It was spacious, crowded, a place to spend the day.

When Rummi Seth took a bunch of visually impaired children to Qutub Minar for an educational trip about 10 years ago, she observed the same thing. The trip turned out to be nothing more than a walk in a garden for the children.

"That set me thinking. How do you explain a monument to someone who hasn't seen it? How do you make them understand what the Qutub Minar is? About its importance or its place in history?"
So, she decided to collaborate with School of Planning and Architecture (SPA), where a detailed plan was prepared to build exact models of some of the most famous monuments in the world to their original dimensions. "The aim is to not just make monuments more accessible to the visually impaired, but to also give them a means to 'see' them through touch and feel," she says.

Over the next one year, 25-30 students from SPA would work on the project and painstakingly build 10 monuments that would be lookalikes of the originals to the last detail. Some of them such as the London Eye and Sanchi Stupa turned out to be great hits among students. "The Eye was made using a bicycle wheel and it caused quite a stir. Children couldn't stop playing with it," Seth says.

"We knew plastic models wouldn't do, nor would those souvenirs you found in the handicraft shops. We had to build models to scale for them to look and feel exactly like the real things. So the small details became the big markers," Shardha Bhandari, an architect who helped coordinate the project with SPA, says.

Source: Indian Express