Deaf, mute and blind student, but vision intact

Twenty-one-year old Sourabh Chougule is Maharashtra’s first deaf and blind student to appear for the Class 10 board exams that begin on Tuesday. Sourabh, a student at the Hellen Keller Institute for Deaf and Deafblind, will appear as a private candidate at the Tilak High School in Ghansoli. 

Sourabh was born in Sangli with a hearing impairment, as a result of which he also became speech-impaired. After having studied in a special school till the age of 10, Sourabh could not continue there as he slowly started losing his vision. A few years later, as he was still trying to come to terms with his multiple impairment, he was brought to the city by his parents and was admitted at the Hellen Keller Institute at the age of 13. Now at the age of 21, he is set to write his Class 10 board exams with the help of two interpreters and a writer. The interpreters will communicate with him through the tactile sign language. 

Devayani Hadkar, one of his interpreters who has been teaching him for the last seven years said that it took three years, to prepare him for the board exam. “He came to us when he was 13 years old and since then we have been training him in studies and vocational skills. It was a difficult task. In the beginning, we had to help him deal with the trauma of suddenly losing his eyesight when he could not speak or hear. After he became visually impaired, all the training in sign language that he had got in the beginning had to be modified to touch as we had to teach him holding hands so that he could interpret,” said Hadkar. 

Hadkar approached the board officials in October 2016 to request Sourabh’s case to be considered as a special one, and to allow him to write the paper in Braille. “We requested the board to allow him to write in Braille but the board officials said that they do not have the necessary mechanism for the same. We still didn’t give up, and decided to train him,” she said. 

Like any other blind student Sourabh gets a writer, but, he has been granted an hour extra for each paper. Hadkar however said that the allotted time is inadequate for the great difficulty of interpretation that is to be done in the whole process. “We have to communicate each and every word to him in some cases where the sentence itself is very important, and he will again communicate in the same manner after which the writer would be able to write for him,” she said. 

As a special case the board has offered some subjects to Sourabh like Bakery Product and Milk Product instead of the first and second language, along with other subjects like Social Sciences and Basic Science, Physiology, Home Science and Health Science.