People of Value

Faridabad - Baroz Vacha

Baroz Vacha (76) is a teacher. She teaches those people who cannot speak, listen, and even see, who are unable to express their feelings that what they think, what they feel and what they want to do in life and whether they know the meaning of life or not.

She is not well known but she is doing her best to give and to make deaf and dumb and visually impaired persons understand the meaning of their lives. She opted very difficult path for herself but she is very dedicated towards her work.

Basically, Baroz Vacha was a pilot and in between she got a chance to meet deaf children and she left her pilot training. Wife of Air force commander, she said, she was 25 year old. In 60's she used to live in Patna and she was under trainee pilot she took 4 years training. In the year 1965, she met with her friend in Kolkata who took her to meet deaf children in a special school 'Aural' she was highly impressed by the work they were doing to make life easier for these special children.

She came to Mumbai with a new idea and joined education audio logy and research society there. After one month's training she was left with a girl who was deaf and who lost her eyes at the age of 16.

In 1977, Baroz Vacha resigned from the education audio logy and research society and opened Helen Keller institute at Mumbai. The sign language used for these children that time Baroz Vacha was not happy with that language. There was a need of different language for them. When she opened her institute that time she had only Rs. 150 and three teachers. She said that she knew the language, which was required, that language should have contained touch because they different from other children because they cannot see, hear and speak so they cannot see the movement of fingers.

The language Baroz invented, in that language children understand everything with the help of touch. If once the students understand the word then comes the part of touch. They understand sentence with this touch only.

Baroz is using computer for deaf and visually impaired children in her institute. Mini brail press of Helen Keller institute is only press of its kind in India. The organiser of this press Mr. Pradeep Sinha says that they invented computers for visually impaired first and now they are using them for deaf visually impaired students also.

Vacha has compurised the brail press. The other speciality of this press is that it has power brailers (which converted common script to brail on computer screen) and the second one is brail embosser (which prints the written material on brail sheets). A half yearly magazine is also issued from this press and these magazines also distributes in Asia, Europe, and America. There are 15 students in this centre who converts the books and maps in brail script.

Today there are 170 students enrolled in the Helen Keller institute.

Source: Sparsh ki zubaan. Dainik bhaskar, Faridabad, 29 June 2005.