A bigger problem looms around the corner. What happens when the parents pass on? What becomes of the child then? This is a nightmare that awards many parents with sleepless nights.

Employment and self sustenance of People with disabilities becomes an extremely relevant need in this context. Economic self-sufficiency is the key to emancipation. Inability to earn and fend for oneself has been used to crush the aspirations of countless downtrodden sections of the society for a long time. The plights of women and the lowest rungs of the caste system in this country are painful examples.

However, the liberation of these social segments was steered through focused support in education and job opportunities over the last few decades. If women and Harijans can rise up from such desperate situations, there are possibilities for differently-abled people too.

This is easier said than done, though. The Indian education system already struggles with an 85% drop-out rate even for regular students. A large section of students with disabilities do not even make the start line at the primary level, let alone them becoming a part of the 15% who eventually step out of the secondary school system. For those who brave the secondary system and step into Higher Education, the real challenges are just dawning . Many of them, especially, those who are visually-challenged are advised not to take Science and Math streams. This shuts down their entry to the huge set of technical careers, irrespective of their aspirations and aptitudes.

Nevertheless, we have a miniscule number of people who show Herculean resolve to conquer all these prejudices and complete their professional qualification, either in technical (BE/Diplomas/Comp. Sciences) or in managerial streams (MBA/BBA). They now face the next Great Wall to scale – ignorance, apathy and under-preparedness of the Corporate sector to integrate them into the workplace.

The path ahead, is daunting.  To put it in simply, we need to ensure that

a)    these children  join and progress through the education system in an integrated and inclusive manner

b)    they can follow their aspiration to pursue Higher education in a stream of their choice

c)    all corporate careers are accessible to all people, irrespective of their disabilities, as long as they meet the relevant qualifications for a  job

Sheer apathy and ignorance have kept PWDs away from enjoying the fruits of the society for too long. However, there are some genuine practical issues that need to be defeated.

For example:
How will a teacher ensure a child with visual /hearing impairment absorb the learning with the rest of the class?
How does she seek and respond to their feedback in the classroom?
How does a child with such problems interact with other children?
How do you teach a child with visual impairment the nuances of geometry and other visual aspects so integrated to our ways of exploring science and math?
How do children with Cerebral Palsy with no way of holding a pen or pencil in their hand and with a speech impediment to boot, communicate their feelings and write exams?
How does a person with total visual impairment interact with a computer terminal and be involved in high quality ICT development or financial analytics processes?
With a public transport system that is unfriendly to majority of usow can these people commute to their jobs?

Sounds impossibly difficult, isn’t it? Not really. Here is where IT can help.

More appropriately, this is where AT (Assistive Technology) can help.

Assistive Technology (AT) is a generic term that includes assistive, adaptive, and rehabilitative devices for people with disabilities. AT promotes greater independence by enabling people to perform tasks that they were formerly unable to accomplish, or had great difficulty accomplishing, by providing enhancements to or changed methods of interacting with the technology needed to accomplish such tasks. (Wikipedia) There is a wide range of AT- Low tech & High Tech.  From Ramps to White Canes to Prosthetics to hearing aids to Speech Generation Devices to motorized wheel chairs to screen readers to eye trackers to cochlear implants to brainwave triggers. As we go higher on the level of inclusion we seek to accomplish, ICT becomes more and more integrated into the AT required.

And ICT has the power to deliver on this promise. Yes. Blind men can “see”, deaf men can “hear”, mute men can “speak” and lame men can “walk”. Even people with Autism and Cognitive challenges have access to AT that help them organize their lives more effectively and independently.

AT has been around for more than three decades in western world. Differently-abled people have integrated in the education system, have access to all streams of higher education and are integral part of many successful corporations and businesses. Rather than just sympathy, these individuals have played key roles in increasing the social fabric of their organizations, enabling higher customer acceptance, higher level of innovation by bringing in wider perspectives and fostering universal design. All these have been possible through a combination of statutory requirements laid down by enlightened governments and excellent progress and availability of AT.

In India, though, the picture is different. We are just beginning to acknowledge PWDs as contributing members of the society. Laws that mandate inclusion are neither comprehensive nor implemented with strong will.

When it comes to AT, indigenous AT is almost non-existent. Imported technologies are extremely expensive. Even those who can afford them hesitate to buy/use them, due to scarce local training and support. A screen reading software like JAWS sells for INR 51,000 per user license for corporate license, discouraging the most-enlightened organizations to take the leap in integrating visually-challenged in mainstream jobs. Motorized Wheel chairs cost no less than INR 100,000. The locally-built basic models start at INR 65,000+ for. Awareness of AT’s potential for inclusive education at the grassroots level is almost zero. Affordable tools like Access switches and Speech Generation Devices with local context that can significantly improve integration of the child with disabilities into the education stream are simply not available.

The irony in India is that a big gap in perception and understanding regarding ICT’s role in disabilities exists in both directions. The community of people with disabilities is not still aware of the full potential of ICT to integrate them into the society. At the same time, our professionals in the ICT business in India have shown very limited understanding of the plight of people with disabilities and how ICT can help in closing the gap. Nor have they shown significant inclination towards getting formally involved in solving these issues at the technology levels.

For a country that boasts of arguably the largest and best technology talent pool in the world, this is a sorry state of affairs. Paradoxically, almost all institutions of technical education have excellent programs to develop socially-relevant solutions as part of their curriculum. Highly-relevant technical solutions that can potentially address the problems of our millions of disabled are sitting on the shelves of these institutions through decades.

any new ones are being developed as I write this.

Unless corporations step up to the plate, this will not change. When I attended the National Conference on AT by ISAAC in Mumbai last year, MindTree was only the listed Indian IT company participating formally in the proceedings. Sadly, the situation was the same 16 months later at the International AT conference in Bangalore in July this year. The only ray of improvement was in the form of two local start-ups that showcased their commercially available solutions.

There is business in it. We have close to 10% of our population as a potential and captive market for these AT. It may not be apparent now but it is a surety within next 10 years. And we need to start somewhere. We need not do everything from the onset. A lot of ground work has already been done. What we need to bring to the table is our strengths in product engineering and marketing, eco systems development and competition.

MindTree’s first product in this space, ADITI, is an access switch developed by an IIT Chennai professor and Vidya Sagar, a Chennai-based NGO for PWDs. We polished the design, made the device Ready to manufacture, encouraged an ecosystem partner to build and sell it at almost 1/10th the price of Internationally-available products. We are now working towards a design overhaul to make it world-class in every sense.

Challenges still remain though. How to keep the price low, while building world-class solutions at low volumes and still build a viable business? How to assess this complex community, where each individual’s need is unique? How to design for mass production at the same time provide for local customization? How to cater to the immense cultural and linguistic diversity of this vast nation?

The answers, of course, are not easy! Nevertheless, we have shown the world how to accomplish difficult things in the past. Most recently, through our ICT story. We have built unique business models, eco systems, processes and disciplines that have awed the world. We now need to turn our collective attention to AT.

It means telling one-tenth of our population that they matter. With one out of three families involving a PWD, every one of us has a personal stake in this. We need to act. Now.​