Institutions

Dehradun: Empowerment! National Institute for Visually Handicapped

The founding fathers of modern India envisaged her as a welfare State where the interests and rights of the weaker and underprivileged sections of society would be fully protected and upheld. This principle is also embodied in the Directive Principles of State policy in our Constitution.

The Government of India has been consistently promoting the interests of handicapped persons who are one of the most underprivileged sections of the society. One of the major steps in this regard was the setting up in 1979 of four national institutes for each category of the handicapped viz. visually handicapped, orthopaedically handicapped, hearing and mentally retarded.

These institutes which are controlled by the Ministry of Social Justice & Empowerment of the Union Government provide facilities for research, training, documentation and consultancy in their respective fields.

Evolution of NIVH

One of these four institutes is the National Institute for Visually Handicapped (NIVH), Dehradun in Uttaranchal. In 1943, an organization known as ‘Saint Dunstans Hostel’ for the war blinded was set up in Dehradun. Its main purpose was to offer training facilities to the soldiers blinded in the Second World War.

The Union Ministry of Education took over the Saint Dunstans Hostel on 1st January, 1950 and renamed it as “Training Centre for the Adult Blind.’ In 1973, the Government of India appointed a group of experts to review the working of the Centre. The group recommended that the center should become a research and training institute. The major recommendations were accepted and accordingly into ‘National Handicapped’ (NIVH) on July 2, 1979.

Facilities at NIVH

The Institute runs a variety of programmes providing training to adult blind, education to blind children, equipment and text-books to the visually handicapped and their institutions at highly subsidized rates and supply of books in Braille and cassettes on lone. It also runs a wide-variety of staff training programmes and research and development project.

Model Institute

The training center for the adult blind attached to this institute provides training adult blind (men and women) in vocational trades like light engineering operations, Dictaphone typing, Braille stenography, chair-canning, bag making, candle making; and Chalk making, knitting etc., apart from imparting training in Braille, music orientation and mobility and home management.

About 2000 blind men and women have successfully completed their training at the center in the last three years. The model School attached to this institute provides free education to blind boys and girls from preschool stage to class X. Here geometry science and geography are taught in Braille to the visually handicapped. The partially sighted children make use of magnifying devices to read print. Nearly 105 students from various parts of the country, are provided free boarding, lodging, clothing and monthly pocket money. The school is affiliated to the Central Board of Secondary Education.

Apart from running a Central Braille press which manufactures Braille text books, the Institute also has a Braille Appliance manufacturing division, which produces a wide variety of waiting, computing, mobility, recreational and other aids and appliances required by the visually handicapped.

The NIVH also runs a National Library for the Print handicapped, Centre for Training Teachers, Centre for the Training of Personal & Research and Development Centre.

Employment

The Institute with the assistance of NIVH has taken up two research programme for the education of pre-school visually handicapped children and development of material for the creation of awareness in parents of visually handicapped and in the community. The placement section attached to this institute provides jobs to its ex-trainiees. Its motto is to identify the caliber of the blind and to provide better placement services.

In the recent past, some jobs were identified in the electronics and electrical manufacturing units and watch factories.

Defence Services

A large number of vacancies of cane-weavers were identified in the Military Engineering Services (MES). It has also secured jobs for the blind as stenographers in subordinate cadres and for its ex-trainees in different branches of nationalized banks. Special efforts are being made to secure similar placement in other departments, which would contribute significantly towards mitigating the unemployment problem of the community.

Source: Empowering the handicapped. The Hindu, Jammu, 19 April 2006.