Leading the way
Prashant Ranjan Varma personifies hope, literally. The 36-year-old has been working on developing assistive technologies and e-books for the visually impaired. Prashant himself is 90 per cent blind.
It all started 17 years ago when 19-year-old Prashant came to Delhi from Jharkhand to take up a chartered accountancy course. But things didn’t go as planned. Prashant got a rare eye infection that took away his vision.
“My family did everything they could, but since my retina was completely damaged, doctors saw no hope for me. Thus, I was left 90 per cent blind,” he recalls. Along with his eyesight, Prashant lost his confidence and restricted himself to his house.
He failed at whatever he tried his hands at. “I attempted to set up a cable TV business and then got into catering business, but couldn’t do it independently,” says Prashant who’s the recipient of National Award for Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities in 2007.
Well, life had bigger and better plans for him. He was destined to serve the society in a different way. And life changed when he took up a computer course at the National Association for the Blind (NAB) in 2000.
“It was just sheer luck that I walked to NAB, and took up the course. I immersed myself in learning computers, and soon became a trainer there,” he says.
But that was just a beginning for Prashant. He soon got associated with Digital Accessible Information System (DAISY), an international consortium, which develops and disseminates electronic books for people with special needs. “I also landed a job with the city’s education department, but chose to quit as I found my work there monotonous. I decided to take up work which would benefit the visually challenged,” he says.
“My work entails a lot of travel to foreign countries where I conduct training workshops in software development for the differently-abled,” says Prashant, who has created cheque-writing and railway reservation softwares for the blind. “Blind often get cheated when they ask for help. With this software, they can themselves write their bank cheques,” says Prashant, adding, that the country is lagging far behind when it comes to the welfare of the physically-challenged.
Prashant also got associated with the Equal Opportunities Cell of the Delhi University, where he helped set up a computer lab for the blind. “My hands are already full, and it often gets difficult to balance so much work, but I know there is a lot still to be done. So, I decided to conduct computer classes in DU thrice a week. We convert all the academic and other books into talking-book format,” says Prashant, who married his student Veena, who is among the few blind people to have done an MBA and working with a public sector company.
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