A total of 109 differently abled children attended the medical camp organised by Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), Vellore at the Block Resource Centre of Madhanur on Wednesday. This was part of the second phase of medical camps to be organised by SSA.

According to officials, 109 differently abled children in the age group of 1 to 18 years attended the camp. The camp covered physically challenged children, those with speech and hearing impairment and mentally challenged children from Madhanur and surrounding blocks.

ANDREW Follows is often seen holding on to his guide dog with one hand and his camera with the other.

‘‘People can often see me [and must be] thinking that doesn’t look right,’’ he laughs.

Born with a condition known as retinitis pigmentosa, Follows has no sight in his left eye and tunnel vision and cataracts in his right eye. He has just a metre of clear sight compared to the 70 metres a person with normal vision has.

Despite being legally blind, Follows is proving that those without sight can still have vision.

For those who grew up in the age before cable television when programmes aired on Doordarshan were the stuff that Sunday afternoons were made of, news broadcast in sign language would always remain etched in their minds.

Fast forward two decades later, the communication intended for the benefit of the hearing impaired is hard to come by on our television channels. Yet another sign of a society that excludes the concept of ‘inclusion', activists would concur.

Lack of awareness

Rekha Goyal, 23, lost her sight due to chickenpox when she was just three. But the fighter that she is, she educated herself at one of the best institutions and found employment in a bank.

With the help of her post-graduate education, and computer and English language skills learnt at the Venu Institute of Universal Education (VIUE), many visually impaired people like Goyal as well as those with other physical handicaps are successfully defying the stereotype that the physically challenged cannot be employed in regular jobs.

There was a ray of hope for differently-abled people in India on Monday when President Pratibha Devisingh Patil announced a separate Department of Disability Affairs in her speech on the first day of the Budget session of Parliament.The Ministry of Civil Aviation also decided to review the existing guidelines for persons with special needs in the wake of a spate of incidents of discrimination faced by them at airports across the country.

The five visually-impaired children appearing for the SSLC examination in the city, two girls and three boys, have more than blindness to overcome.

These children, who attend classes with normal children in regular schools like Cotton Hill and SMV School, are not provided any special tuition.

Making things more difficult for these students, they have not been given Braille-enabled textbooks this year.

Despite staggering figures that point towards the growing unemployability rate among the disabled, some NGOs and Government     organisations are trying to better the situation by offering such people a platform to perform.On the eve of the World Disabled Day,   Sangeeta Yadav tells you about the available opportunities