Equal Opportunity: Vision and Future

EOC: Vision and Future

Tanmoy Bhattacharya

[Talk given at the AIF-RTE meeting, 7^th Nov. 2009, University of Delhi]

The Equal Opportunity Cell, of the University of Delhi (http://eoc.du.ac.in) was constituted in 2006 with Rama Kant Agnihotri as the co-ordinator to provide equal accessibility and a barrier free environment to persons with physical disabilities and students in reserved categories, such as SC/ST/OBC and other minorities.

Right at the beginning, I’d like to emphasise that ‘barrier-free’ is now a much familiar phrase which, in the common imagination, implies environmental aspects of accessibility (like building more ramps, putting up signages, etc.), but as Anita Ghai in her talk later will re-emphasise, it is more than a physical concept alone. In fact, we have come to stand for the view that the barriers are more a part of the society and the collective mind-set of the society peopled by the majority doing and building things for the majority.

When the EOC was constituted, there were very few members and even fewer enthusiasts and takers. We didn’t have a space of our own, the meetings were held every month or at least every two months, in a tiny corner of the Braille library where a motley crowd of 10 or so people, including some interested students, would gather to discuss the newly emerging issues to do with disability. Even we didn’t have a clear agenda but one hallmark of this early period was the accessibility audit that was conduced for the colleges of the university, and later for many university buildings, by Samarthyam. It is only now that the implementation work of that audit is taking shape slowly. Apart from that, we would deal case by case issues of disability as referred to the committee. Early on, we dealt with the inhuman case of one lecturer of this university in wheel chair who would sometimes have 2-3 hours gap between two classes and would have to simply wait in the corridor in the wheelchair, the teachers room being on the first floor; there wasn’t even an accessible toilet and the person would have to be carried by two people to the toilet.

It took two years of single minded vision of Prof. Agnihotri and few dedicated individuals associated with him to bring into existence the modern space that we have now. This, in spite of active and genuine support from the Vice-Chancellor and Pro-Vice-Chancellor of this university, for whom, the EOC is like their favourite child – so much so, that in all the functions that we have arranged so far, at least one of them, and sometimes both of them, like on the Orientation Day, would be present. We do not have any high-profile function, we do not get dignitaries in our centre, but the VC and/or the PVC’s presence can be counted upon. With this support and the generous support from NTPC, who on their own came up to provide financial and engineering help, the DU-NTPC ICT Centre was inaugurated on 20^th October 2008.

After the centre was set up, along with continuing the earlier work, it has also made available assistive devices through another NGO Saksham to ones who need them, produced about 100 scanned books and collected 4000 e-books. A strong area of the EOC has been to hold sensitising and awareness workshops for different groups within and outside the university. Again, we have a very dedicated staff of people manning the centre, Dr. Nisha Chandra Singh, the Officer on Special Duty has been looking after the workshops very efficiently among other everyday work at the Centre, Prashant Verma who is  the manager of the Centre employed by the NTPC has been looking after the ICT course, Hidam Gaurashyam (technical assistant for the Hearing Impaired) and Ramnik Singh (technical assistant for the orthopaedically impaired) are hired as specialists in their areas and they are doing a commendable job. In addition, we have a very dedicated staff of people like Geeta, Vinod and Rajbeer who have been doing much more than just their job profile demands, like everybody else at the Centre. Almost all these people are here today making this meeting happen!

However, the flagship programme of the Centre has been the short-term certificate courses that were started on December 3, 2008; in fact, Sonal Sena, sitting here, was the one who took the first class at the Centre – it was as a part of the Disability and Human Rights course. We started with 4 courses, namely, Sign Language Interpretation (A Level), Disability and Human Rights, Information and Communication Technology, mostly geared toward the Visually Impaired, and Communicative English, mainly geared towards the reserved candidates. Although we didn’t have a lot of time for publicity, we managed to get a good number of students (88) during the first run. Many experts from the disability field were invited to deliver special lectures and take classes as part of the Disability and Human Rights course. For the next batch of courses, we introduced a new course entitled News Reading, Anchoring and Voice Over taught by well-known television personality J.V.Raman; several invited lectures were given by experts from Doordarshan on topics ranging from news reading, anchoring, makeup, lighting, to the portrayal of disability in the media by Anita Ghai a few weeks back. Further, among the next batch of courses to be started in January 2010, we’d like to introduce another new course, Sign Language Interpretation (B Level) for students who have passed the A-level course of this Centre or any other institute. The courses have been a judicial mix of skill development and awareness building. Thus, they are designed to provide skills required to enhance job prospects and also to provide manpower for sectors dedicated to working for the disabled, like Sign Language interpretation and Human Rights.

Apart from the courses, the other academic component of the Centre has been to hold monthly workshops on Sign Language which has been quite popular and reports of the workshops are available at the EOC website. We are also concentrating on issues that have to do with the universal evaluation metric that is applied still in our schools and colleges, where the orthopaedically disabled person is forced to climb up exams and interviews, where the visually impaired person is forced to write exams with or without assistance, where the deaf is interviewed or orally examined. Very few people know that reading or writing skills of the blind or the deaf is very low, and this is not only the case of India in isolation. A survey in the US revealed that 18 year deaf students have the reading skills of a 6^th grader. I have been saying this for a while, that among the deaf there is a high level of illiteracy, that is because the education system as a whole, and definitely the evaluation method, is heavily biased against the disabled. We need to address strongly the issue of equitability of testing and exam systems. I think this meeting of educationist and school-teachers here can take this up in one of their future meetings.

However, we don’t want this to turn into a mere training centre, otherwise it will be just a centre for getting a DU certificate. A mere training centre cannot take the movement ahead – I am calling it a ‘movement’ because that is how we need to view disability at the moment and perhaps for another half-a-century to come. There needs to be an underlying philosophy that binds us together and takes us ahead. I outlined this in a recent talk in the context of the philosophy of justice of Martha Nussbaum. There she proposes the Capabilities Approach, which advices us that instead of making bargains as equals, we’d be better off if we participate with our varying degrees of capacity and disability and establish an interconnection of mutually dependent network with each other. For example, I mentioned earlier the high level of illiteracy among the deaf, it is quite possible to make minimal adjustments and create a network between the deaf and the hearing where there is a give and take relation between the two.

In addition, we also need a political vision, especially in a world that is threatened by, what I call, radical homogeneity. With the dissolution of a mainly bipolar world (at least in the Anglo-American discourse), the initial euphoria of globalisation has given way to this threat of radical homogeneity that has pervaded across many spheres of life. This complete absence of agonism and antagonism and conflict in opinion-making can be countered only if a radical form of democracy can be extended to more and more spheres of our lives. And an institute like the Equal Opportunity Cell is one such sphere. The logic of equality cannot be the logic of homogeneity, it has to be the logic of ‘equivalence’. This is where we tie up with an organisation like the AIF-RTE, and also in our need to enrich our experience of activism, I think we are doing alright with teaching, training and documentation aspects but the activism side has been so far lacking and we are fortunate to be able to host this meeting and learn something in return.

©Tanmoy Bhattacharya 2009