In a move aimed to help deaf students get access to good education, the Union Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment is mulling to provide the tablets — loaded with digital video to such students.
“Our department is planning to provide tablets to deaf students to enable them to access educational videos in sign languages,” Rajesh Aggarwal, Secretary, DEPwD said recently at an event here recently.
Sources in the Ministry said that nitty-gritties are being worked out in this direction to identify the beneficiaries and details on financial provisions.
The move follows concern that only 5 per cent hearing impaired children get basic schooling and 1 per cent of the total deaf population has access to quality education in the country. Of these just 2-5 per cent of students with impaired hearing in the country have access to university education.
The cohort is too small given that India is home to the highest number of children with hearing impairment in the world. At least 1.57 million children are hearing disabled in the educational age group 0–19 years.
The experts in the sector say that more need to be done as most of the children face difficulties in understanding concepts on a daily basis in schools because education and information are not accessible in Indian languages.
In fact, Director at the Gurugram centre of Haryana Welfare Society for Persons with Speech and Hearing Impairment, Dr Seema had recently pointed out that there is little or no emphasis on sign language and 98 per cent of the special educators in the country have limited or no sign language skill.
“As a result, despite years of schooling, students with hearing impairment remain language and education deprived. More than 90% of such children are born to parents who don’t have the required information and resources to provide early communication skills,” she said, according to reports. The experts also rued that most policies for hearing impaired students are framed by people who can hear and only few deaf researchers are involved in decision-making, resulting in substandard teacher training courses for such students.
Doing its bit, Solunus Inc., a leading provider of Salesforce services, had recently distributed 50 tablet computers loaded with digital learning materials to hearing-impaired students in Telangana.
Sudhakar Pennam, the founder and CEO of Solunus Inc. had said, “Unfortunately, less than 10% of students with hearing challenges who have completed Class 10 only are pursuing intermediate courses. Even more disturbing is the fact that only 2-5% of students with impaired hearing in our country have access to university education.”
“One of the key challenges in delivering quality education and training to these students is inadequate special learning facilities,” Pennam said, lamenting that “This is further complicated by an abysmally-low number of skilled trainers in sign language, considering the huge number of students with disabilities.”
Banking on technology-assisted learning programs, the firm has partnered with the creators of E Sign Meta app, a novel e-learning solution for such children.