A Port For Those In Need
- Braille menus at the canteen is the beginning of the project.
- Steel-embossed plates on the foot of bridges is the next step.
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It was the first time Divakar and his friends were reading the menu at a restaurant and they were getting a kick out of it. The menu in Braille at the railway station’s canteen was just one of the novel experiences the group of four boys studying at the Kuvempunagar pre-university college in Mysore encountered last week.
There’s a tactile map of the station’s layout at the entrance so they can get a sense of what is located where, along with information on train timings. On the railings of the foot overbridges, there are embossed steel plates every five metres that tell them which platform they are on. And it is here at the Mysore railway station where an idea to help the blind help themselves is taking shape: the very first such initiative in a country that’s home to the world’s largest population of blind people. Says K.B. Darshan, who takes the train once in a while to visit relatives in Bangalore, “I normally would have to stop and seek help from people before finding my way from the entrance and getting into a train.” The map and the railing markers now help him navigate on his own.
For Darshan, relying on people for help is something he does everyday—his biggest fear is crossing a road and he’s hoping that Braille installations such as these are made available in more public places. Of course, there are a few other examples, like bank notes which have raised print to help disabled people tell the denomination. And for the record, Darshan and his companions use WhatsApp, ride city buses regularly, visit friends and play cricket. They hail from different parts of Karnataka, having spent their initial years in a special school for the blind before they joined the college which, they remind you, is a regular institution. Divakar says with obvious pride that he has met Shekar Naik, captain of India’s blind cricket team, who, like him, hails from Shimoga. India is home to a fifth of the world’s population of blind people (the figure was 8 million in 2010 according to a WHO estimate). The station facility is currently in its test phase, says Pancham Cajla, 27, whose NGO Anuprayaas teamed up with the railway authorities for the project. It will require some improvements in design—like a permanent steel-embossed Braille map of the layout (the map has brass tacks on a board for now) and possibly an audio device.
Cajla, an engineer who quit his job last year hoping to start a venture of his own, says his organisation wants to change the way sighted people perceive the blind. His is a fledgling outfit that has a handful of people chipping in part time—Gautam Kannan, an engineer with Infosys and two postgraduate students of Mysore University, Sahana V.P. and Shwetha A.R. One of the social media campaigns Anuprayaas promotes is a blind selfie (getting youngsters to blindfold themselves and take a picture) to drive home the idea. They add that the Braille initiative wasn’t very complicated to execute although it required redesigning the steel banisters on the foot bridges to allow the embossed plates to be welded onto them. The overall material bill was around Rs 70,000, not counting the manhours involved, which will be funded by the Mysore Lok Sabha member’s Local Area Development Fund. The canteen menu too is a work in progress: it is currently printed on cardboard. “It will help if it’s made of metal, otherwise the dots will get flattened over time,” says Darshan. But for someone whose fingertips are deciphering the world around him, there’s an unmistakable spark when they chance upon those dots.
By Ajay Sukumaran in Mysore
