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Hi, this is George Abraham and welcome to Eyeway Conversations. My guest today is Dr. Sam Taraporevala, who's a retired Professor of Sociology from St. Xavier's College, Bombay University, and a disability activist. Welcome, Sam!
Good afternoon, George. Nice to interact with you.
So the Xavier's Resource Center for the Visually Challenged XRCVC is something that you had initiated at St. Xavier's college, Bombay. What's the story behind it, Sam?
Well, if I were to be frank, it was pure chance. And I say so because of a certain background. I have been born blind, I completed my education in a regular school. Consequently, I never really interacted with other blind persons. And after my academic study which ended in a Ph. D. I joined St. Xavier's college in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. This was way back in 1988. From then, for the next 12 odd years, I used to involve myself with my teaching, some amount of research. And yes, we did have students with blindness and low vision as students within the college and I did have them as some of my students in my regular classes. What happened was that around early 2001-2002 somewhere there, in one particular year there was not a single student with blindness or low vision studying at St. Xavier's. This was very atypical because routinely, we had about 10 to 12 students in any given academic year spread across the different academic levels.
Yeah.
So this actually sparked my curiosity - where did these people disappear? Why aren't they coming here? It was more a research curiosity than anything else. I started just I would say, exploring around or nosing around and I found one interesting pattern which is that another college in Mumbai, it's called Ruia, they had started a resource center in terms of computer facility for the blind students. So they had started some computers with JAWS and that became the magnet. So nobody wanted to come to Xavier's.
Right.
Now I put this thought to my college management that look, we talk of social justice, we talk of this and that but this is the reason why students aren't coming. So why don't you look at setting up a facility. So they said who will set it up and I had no desire at that stage to set up any facility. Let me be frank.
Right.
But then I said okay but at the same time PC was costing around sixty plus thousand rupees. And that was a PC which would be laughed at by today's younger generations in terms of its RAM, in terms of its processing speed, in terms of its memory but it still costs sixty plus thousand and above and JAWS was also as expensive. Remember I'm talking about something in 2003.
Right.
So money had a different value at that time.
Yes.
So the management also told me look, we would be happy if you are taking the responsibility to set it up. But higher education is cash trapped, you won't get any money from the college, you will get our support.
Right.
And you will get a physical space. Beyond that, it's for you to find everything. So for some time, and I had frankly no experience in setting up facilities like this nor raising funds, right. But I did have one thing and that time, which has been with me since the time I was very young, thanks to my family, which is that always have a positive viewpoint. And always try to find solutions. Don't look at problems. And that's when I put my first proposal together and that yielded grant from one of the TATA Trust. And the moment we set up our first computer, in the very next year, we had 20 students.
Wow.
It obviously was the basic problem and this was the solution. Then initially, the idea was to set it up just as a small facility where students could come in access the internet, etc. But then after we've grown organically in meeting different needs that come up from time to time.
That's very interesting story. And so XRCVC has come a long way since the inception. And would you like to tell us what all does XRCVC actually do and what has been the growth story.
So let's put it this way, the trajectory we took was to weave everything around our students, our members. And I'm not just saying students because I then used the term members because initially we were restricted to students but soon as students graduated, they started working and they started coming with needs, so also did our students come with needs. And needs were not necessarily direct technological in terms of - I want to learn the screen reader, I want to learn how to use scanning software, etc. It went well beyond that. To list a few. This was an academic problem to start with. A student came to us with a book running into 800 pages on Indian economics and said, "can you give me a soft copy of this?" And I said let's scan it. He said that, "you can scan but you will never get accurate rendering for the simple reason that there are so many tables and things can go out of alignment. Can you not get me a soft copy from the publisher?" To cut a long story short, the publisher refused and it went back and forth. And finally, we decided why not try to change the copyright law which took us six years- in 2012 it changed. That doesn't mean that publishers are obliged to give us accessible copy. But at least then scanning is no longer a violation of the law. Some students came to us saying that, "Look I've got myself a job and my employer requires me to open a salary account. But the bank is not opening it." And again, social advocacy at work, we worked with the RBI and got them to change the rules. The rule was as crazy as saying that a blind person should be treated on par with an illiterate person, which meant that a blind person could never open a bank account on a single name. That changed around 2009 or 2010 I don't remember the exact year now. Around the same period, we started working on accessible ATMs. These are ATM machines which you can plug your headset into and the different functionalities are mapped to the keypad so that you can choose your language by pressing one or two, you can press increase volume, decrease volume, choose the type of transaction, enter your pin everything through voice inputs which you hear through your headphones. And so much so that you can even blank the ATM screen out so that if somebody is peeping from behind your shoulder, that individual would not get the opportunity to read what you are up to.
Right.
So the ATMs became a big issue. Now to back us up in all these initiatives, one of the major awareness programs we developed. This was starting in 2006 was the students coming to us and saying, look, you've set up a great facility here. But so many of our sighted classmates know nothing about us. They handle us sometimes with kid gloves. And they don't treat us as human, they treat us as people who are blind first and then human later - human later may never even come into the equation. So can we change this? And that's when we thought of starting sensitization workshop, giving lectures to people would make no sense. Students don't want to listen to lectures, as it is bored of listening to enough lectures. So he thought of doing it through fun and that's where we conceptualized Antarchakshu which is now our trademark awareness and sensitization workshop. We've taken it to various destinations. In fact, over 40,000 people have gone through the experience by now, botht in the mega walkthrough experiences also sit down experiences. And now in the very recent past, on account of the COVID lockdown scenario, we've even taken it online and in fact, this year currently season four of Antarchakshu, the sit down version is running. It's an online version and we've crossed over, I think 1200 participants in this last three or four months itself. We customize that workshop to various target profiles. We've done it for students, we've done it for corporate employees, we do it for people who are becoming teachers. So obviously, the core message remains the same, but the add ons in terms of the focus, keeping the target population in mind gets adapted.
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Beyond this we have now actively got into over the last few years, STEM education- Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. When I was growing up, as much as I was excited by engineering, there was no way I could get into it. And thanks to technology today which has become the potential leveler, we are able to actually create accessible mechanisms by which a blind or low vision students can seek education within engineering or in other areas of interest which may be science. So for example, right now in St. Xavier's college, one of our students is just completing his BSc, he's in the final year of BSc with chemistry.
Right.
And it is interesting that even during the lockdown period, he was able to do his work. And right now that things are open, he is one of the few people who comes for his practicals.
It's a very interesting thing that you're talking about Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. And one of the reasons why these subjects are kept away from blind people is you know the visual element in the delivery of the teaching, or the pedagogy and also, the thing about drawing and the thing about handling chemicals, measurements, and so on. So in the STEM outreach of yours, could you walk us through some of the interesting solutions that you come up with?
We have not come up with any solutions. We have only pieced together the solutions.
Right.
And also, in addition to that, there is the application of mind.
Yeah.
And very honestly, awareness sessions with the different stakeholders be it their teachers in the class who have to change that whole vision, maybe they'll look through it through a different prism altogether. So the awareness, the training, things have started working now. It's not easy but it's doable. In terms of Maths per se, well there are some softwares which if installed and you have training, your Math will be rendered accessible in terms of its speech, how it speaks out otherwise if you write x square plus y square, it will say x two plus y two which you wanted to read it as x square plus y square, there's a better way of doing it. And I'm not getting into technicalities here. There are also special measuring devices whereby you can actually have for example a drop counter, if user's having to put certain number of drops of a particular chemical or you have calibrated ways of measuring different liquids or weights. In addition, in fact you even have talking devices which along with the various sensors that come along, actually speak out things. Diagrammatical representations are possible. There is software available today. For example, to get braille output you may use a software called tactile view.
Right.
Or you may use thermoform paper, frightfully expensive but it's doable. Models are another way. In fact, some years back, one of the students we worked with she became a qualified Physiotherapist doing her Bachelor's in Physiotherapy with the mainstream. And that was a bigger challenge, we had to even go to court to get her permissions for the simple reason that again, they have very strong rigid mindsets and today she has her own practice.
Now you kind of adopted or you've developed or you put together these solutions for STEM at your college. The bigger picture is that at the end of the semester or at the end of the year, you have university exams and your evaluation is done at the university level and you're bound by university rules.
Your question won't hold water totally because we are an autonomous college.
Right.
And as an autonomous college, we have the right to design our own examination systems. But having said that, there are very clear cut government norms, in terms of the RPWD Act 2016 and other norms which can be adapted. So for example, when the physiotherapy student was finally doing her studies, things had to be adapted, right? Or when it comes to standard 11th and 12th and whether it was CBSE or HSC. They went through the regular board process. So things are doable, it's just a question of application of mind and working at it.
Right.
That we are right now guiding some colleges in fact, IITs, whether it's IIT Chennai, IIT Delhi, IIT Madras or we're working with engineering college in Surat. We're also working with other colleges to not just promote STEM but overall, make the inclusion process totally harmonious.
Right.
I didn't mention this earlier. But over the last five to six years, Xavier's has adopted an active policy to look at all disabilities. So although we may have the name XRCVC, that's Xavier's Resource Center for the Visually Challenged. I would say we are looking at various disabilities rather than just visual disabilities. And in doing so, we are trying to provide an inclusive educational experience for a person, be it with a locomotive problem or hearing issue, cognitive problem, whatever it is. And to start with, we've as a college adopted a policy framework which talks of equal opportunities, and we have tried to adopt the 360 approach to inclusion. So right from the entrance to the exit, everything should be as inclusive as possible. We have a system of asking students to fill up an accommodation form once they have enrolled so that we customize the offering to the needs of the student and not try to just impose a blanket solution. And we now have taken this a step further to other colleges in what we call the Shamil offering. Some higher education institutes have already joined us in our collective quest.
Now that's very interesting. And I think if you have met with so much of success in including at Xavier's, I'm sure that experience would be very useful for colleges and universities across the country and I think that's a wonderful initiative.
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I also wanted to check with you- you said that you had your vision issues right from when you were a little child and you grew up in the mainstream. So could you share with me what were the challenges that came about and how did you and your family address it because we grew up at a time when there was no technology, no computers and JAWS and NVDAs and so on.
So as I mentioned earlier, I was born blind. What I didn't mention was that I have a elder brother two and a half years my senior was also blind from birth.
Yeah.
So my family had two blind kids growing up in the early 1960s where the prevailing wisdom was that if somebody is blind, they should go to a school for the blind.
Right.
And that was the type of pressure exerted on my parents that, "oh you don't know how to do it and the schools know how to do it, let them go there." And that simple thought process was, well if they go to a school for the blind, will there then be a college for the blind and then post that a world where only blind people are going to live or are our kids going to grow up and need to learn to live in society? And obviously, it was the latter. So I would say we were very fortunate that very close to where we were staying, there was a school which had just started up. And my parents went and met the person who's the founder who'd come back after being trained in the Montessori method and she's just starting the school which is 3-4 years old, it was pretty young at that stage.
Right.
Name was Activity, it was called New Activity then. And she said that, "I believe that every child needs to get an opportunity to grow and we will do our best, we don't know but we will do our best". And I had a shadow teacher at that time who would come in sometimes. She'd also come back to India again. Fortuitously, she had just come back from being trained at Perkins.
Right.
And again, she was staying not too far from where we stayed, very close to the school as well. Not that she would come to school every day or anything like that. She gave me my basic training in braille. And we were the only two blind kids in school. And let me tell you, we grew up like any other kid, rough and tumble as any kid would have and that was a good experience to become rough and tough. Another great thing we had and I would say that has been my greatest source of strength has been family support.
Right.
My family, especially my mother because there were no computers. She was a human reader. In fact, the first time I actually use computers was in the end the time of my PhD. I had to do some number crunching and then finally, to work process my PhD thesis. Otherwise there were no computers and that was not even a screen reader of computer. The first time I encountered a computer with screen readers was in the early 2000s when I started my exploration into why Xavier's was lagging behind. So the human reader was what I depended on. Braille was what I depended on. And well, to cut a long story short, anybody who has the active human support will succeed.
Right.
Knowledge is important, no doubt but it's not a substitute. It's a supplement.
When you grew up in the mainstream. Did you find it difficult to make friends because a lot of people find it difficult to get into social groups? What was your experience like?
No, as I told you, we grew up in school, we were the only blind kids in school but my classmates accepted us for what we were. They would fool around sometimes with our blindness but that was part of the deal. It was part of the growing up. Also, I learned not to make my blindness a point of self pity.
You know, you've had a very busy kind of life as a Professor, as an activist and you also do a lot of administrative work when it comes to XRCVC. How does Dr. Sam Taraporevala relax? What are your passions and interests outside the so called mainstream work that you do?
Well, I like to listen to music. And I like to read read anything from the sublime to the ridiculous.
So what are some of your favorite authors?
Well, I sometime back was reading a lot of Jeffrey Archer but there's nothing like a favorite author. If I pick up something I read it and whether it's fiction, nonfiction, anything, it just feel happy to read. It's a good diversion. And a lot of reading also gives you an insight into the human mind ultimately.
You know, we all grew up in a kind of world where a lot of people around us and if we had the opportunity, we too did do a lot of reading. But today, when you look at the students, most of them read just what is barely necessary in maybe the textbooks, maybe some reference books but when it comes to reading fiction and all that you know, they are very short on it. And there is a lot of revolutionary breakthroughs in terms of adaptive, you know like you have Audible, you have Sugamya Pustakalaya, you have Bookshare. Do you feel a little disappointed that these resources are not being used the way they could be used?
Yes, I feel disappointed. I just asked myself whether if I had those facilities 15 years ago, would I have used them and I think the answer would have been yes. But then I don't want to value judge anybody. Today's youth like to have two minute fixes, including Maggi noodles. It's a choice people make and everything is wanted in quick, condensed fashion perhaps that's to do with the pace of life. So I don't want to sit and judging it but yes, there's so much resources and if they're not used, it's sad no doubt. But that's a given scenario, we have to provide resources because out of the 100 there in the wide world, even if two people are really avidly wanting content, they should have a right to get it.
So Sam it's wonderful speaking with you. Thank you very much for giving your time. I appreciate the fact that you've taken the time to speak to us and wish you all the very best.
Thanks, George. It's been a pleasure and wish the program all success. Thanks once again for having me over.
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