Major Gopal Mitra (41) may desire to borrow vision for few moments to salute the Indian tricolour flying high at the UNICEF headquarters in New York on his first day of a new job tomorrow. A former Indian Army officer, Mitra is the first disabled person from India to be appointed at the headquarters of a major UN agency.
The Social Welfare Society at the Commecs Institute of Business and Emerging Sciences (CIBES) organised an event for collecting donations for the disabled, at their Share Faisal campus. The affair was held in collaboration with the Pakistan Association of the Blind, on Sunday.
This is no usual boy-meets-girl love story. Rakesh Solanki and Sunita Pawar, both visually impaired, will be tying the knot on Sunday.
And, NGO Louis Braille Apang Kalyan Sanstha, Lonikand, is playing Cupid for the couple by making it a grand affair, much
beyond the meagre means of the two.
The NGO works for the visually challenged by making provisions of home, education and vocational skills.
Attributing their alliance to the sanstha, Rakesh said, “The founder of this NGO, Arjun Kendre, was my batchmate at PR Lunkad Blind School, Bhosari.”
The ability to look both ways before crossing a street, read a simple recipe or punch in a telephone number is often taken for granted by those without visual impairment.
But nearly 15 million people living in the U.S. can’t perform some of these tasks. And that includes many American Indians.
The Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council (NAC) wants the human resource development (HRD) ministry to amend the right to education (RTE) law to ensure that disabled children have the choice to study either in an ordinary or a special school. ”The HRD ministry should amend the act to ensure that the RTE to all children with disabilities is safeguarded and that the choice to such children to study in an inclusive school or a special school is real,” said the draft guidelines framed by the council’s working group on the rights of the disabled. According to the NAC, while one view was tha
Poorva Subramanium is barely 10 years old, but has learnt an important lesson in life — not to trouble her parents when they come out of the schools they have been visiting these days. “It is frustrating. No school wants to admit her. She is good at shapes, colours and can also read,” says her mother, showing her report card from a special school here that deems her, ‘Fit to be admitted in a mainstream school'.
All was well with 24-year-old S Vinay Kumar till the day he was diagnosed with incurable congenital glaucoma. Rough days began as Vinay started losing his vision every day and finally lost it completely in 2007. "I was diagnosed with the disease in 2004 and went completely blind by 2007.
Only about 10 to 12 percent of the nation's blind population are able to read Braille, and some advocates are worried that the nearly 200-year-old system of writing for the visually impaired could be on its way out.
Michael Cush was born with vision loss and learned Braille when he was a child, but he hardly uses it now.
"It's just not practical in my day-to-day life, mainly because it is very laborious and expensive to produce and also it is not very portable," says Cush.
At a rare workshop organised by a city not-for-profit, 61 vision-impaired participants were given cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and first-aid training on Sunday. This is probably the first workshop of its kind in India. “We wanted to eradicate the myth that the vision impaired cannot help anyone, and therefore thought the workshop was a good idea” said Sushmeetha B Bubna, founder director, Voice Vision, the NGO that organised the workshop that was held at HK Institute of Management Studies and Research in Jogeshwari.
There is not much by way of reading facilities for the visually challenged population in the State. While the vast majority has to make do with the help of others who read aloud for them, the practical impediments of Braille system make text books largely unavailable.
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