(Sitting) G Vijayaraghavan and wife Rema pose with their family. (Standing from left) Son-in-law Abin Pious George, daughters Lakshmy and Parvathy, son-in-law Ganesh Vijayakrishnan, son Rahul and his fiancee Visali http://www.telegraphindia.com/1150304/jsp/nation/story_6837.jsp Thiruvananthapuram, March 3: If ever dry economic proposals did make a father proud, it is this year's budget.
His baby - now around 18 - has just been promoted to a national university, the country's first in its field of study. The Narendra Modi government's decision to elevate the Thiruvananthapuram-based National Institute of Speech and Hearing (NISH) as India's first National University for Disability Studies and Rehabilitation Sciences is a dream come true for one man. "I have two daughters who are deaf," said technocrat G. Vijayaraghavan, whose concern for his twins had motivated him to conceive the institute in 1997. "When we set up NISH, they were about seven. At the age of about two, two-and-a-half, we had to take them to Mysore for tests as we did not have any facility in Kerala. In a way, that was the motivation," recalled Vijayaraghavan, who also pioneered Kerala's information technology revolution at the age of 31. Like every year, Vijayaraghavan was glued to the budget speech when the announcement came. "I was happy," he said. "There are mainly two-three things - when this gets recognised along with other national-level institutions, of course the responsibility is higher, but the potential also becomes higher. It was in the same paragraph as the IITs and IIMs, which means it is being looked at that level, which is a very positive thing." Vijayaraghavan said he didn't think the recognition would "come so soon" and gave credit to the efforts of K.M. Chandrasekhar, former Union cabinet secretary and now vice-chairman of the Kerala State Planning Board. Chandrasekhar sought to play down his role. "The primary reason," he said from Delhi, "was I think they (the government) were convinced that some studies needed to be conducted in the field of disabilities and some training facilities needed to be put in place. And NISH was already working in the area." In November last year, Vijayaraghavan, the man behind Thiruvananthapuram's Electronics Technology Parks - India's biggest IT park in built-up area that employs close to 50,000 people - had made a presentation to the minister in charge of the disabilities division. The beginning Back in the mid-nineties, the institute had started with a note to the then chief minister, E.K. Nayanar, and industries minister Suseela Gopalan. "They asked me for some project in the software sector, but I told them I got something like this. Both of them were empathetic to that. That's how it started, it was there in the 1996 budget speech, but subsequently nothing happened. Then they called me one day and asked, why don't you get it going? They wanted me to look after it, but I initially said no. Ultimately I agreed, subject to the condition that it would be an honorary position," Vijayaraghavan reminisced. "There were lot of challenges. Like for example, the Nayanar government decided to give us land but there were some people in the bureaucracy who created problems. Then when A.K. Antony came, we pushed it through him and he acted favourably too. And then Oommen Chandy came and land came to us." After NISH was set up as a society under the state's social justice department in 1997, it sent its first batch of teachers to an institution in Chennai called Balavidyalaya for training. A UK-trained lady by the name Anu Kurien handled the pre-school training for the first two years and worked on honorary basis, not even taking travel expenses, Vijayaraghavan recalled. "Then we started a correspondence programme for parents of hearing impaired children, very similar to the John Tracy clinic in the US set up by Louise Treadwell Tracy and her actor husband Spencer Tracy whose son was diagnosed as deaf. We looked at their programmes and then launched a programme," Vijayaraghavan said, adding that this was done on a voluntary basis by Gita Rajagopal, the wife of an IAS officer. "Over the past 3-4 years, there is this couple in Thiruvananthapuram, Sankar Krishnan and Divya Krishnan from IIM Ahmedabad. Sankar... was a senior partner with McKinsey. They came back to Thiruvananthapuram and have been helping us to get this direction of where we should go. "There are lot of people who have given us support and there is a lot of goodwill. There is a family called Kolam Variath in central Kerala. They were the first major donors to the campus, gave us Rs 26 lakh for setting up pre-school classes." Impact Today, all government centres in Kerala have equipment to find out if a child can hear or not, while compulsory screening has started over the last two-three years. But elevation to a university brings with it other advantages. "Once this becomes a university, it will get into other areas too like autism, cerebral palsy, etc., and we expect to do a lot of research in this area. In India, research in the field of disabilities is limited. So one will need to look at international collaboration with universities around the world." -- Avinash Shahi Doctoral student at Centre for Law and Governance JNU Register at the dedicated AccessIndia list for discussing accessibility of mobile phones / Tabs on: http://mail.accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/mobile.accessindia_accessindia.org.in Search for old postings at: http://www.mail-archive.com/accessindia@accessindia.org.in/ To unsubscribe send a message to accessindia-requ...@accessindia.org.in with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in Disclaimer: 1. 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