Adding worth to life

The rights of the disabled with regard to health, education and employment are still merely words on paper, while an obvious gap exists between ideal and present practice. VISARAVINDRAN writes on the role of NGOs like the WORTH Trust who have contributed a great deal in rehabilitating differently abled people.

"When we do the best that we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life, or in the life of another."

Helen Keller: Out of the Dark

THE long road from affliction to dignity is paved with the stones of diligence and the soil of compassion. The logo of the WORTH (Workshop for Rehabilitation and Training of the Handicapped) Trust says it all - the symbol is taken from one end of a spanner signifying the present specialisation in the area of the engineering industry, but, looked at more closely, there are two hands protecting a flower with a missing petal. The hands support the disabled. After a recent visit to their units in Katpadi I am also sensitised to its reflecting another important aspect of any venture of this sort: the union of head and heart that is necessary for the sustainable growth of NGO attempts at rehabilitation of the disadvantaged. What it also stands for is the vision and hard work of a dedicated band of men whose helping hands have taken the physically-challenged from the depths of hopelessness to a place of worth and dignity.

The Persons with Disability Act, 1995 (Equal Opportunities, Protection of Rights and Full Participation) which came into effect on February 7, 1996, provides for both preventive and promotional aspects of rehabilitation like education, employment, vocational training, job reservation and manpower development and the creation of a barrier-free environment. It also speaks of special insurance schemes for the disabled, compensation for the unemployed disabled and provisions like the establishment of homes for the severely disabled, of public buildings, rail compartments, buses, ships and aircraft designs having to incorporate features to give easy access to the disabled; and of toilets in all public places and waiting rooms to be made wheelchair-accessible, with braille and sound symbols to be provided in lifts. All public places, it further announces, shall be barrier-free, with ramps giving free access. Despite the well- meaning elements of government policy, reality is that even the Houses of Parliament, according to a recent report, do not enjoy these advantages and this has kept a seriously injured wheelchair-bound Sunil Dutt from attending its sessions. In this serious gap that exists between ideal and present practice it is NGOs like the WORTH Trust who play a greatly enabling role in rehabilitation. In this situation where even welfare of the disabled is still to catch on, the rights of the disabled are far from establishing their presence in our health, education and employment policies.

Situated at Katpadi, just off the Chennai-Bangalore highway, the WORTH Trust grew from the Leprosy Rehabilitation Centre run by the Swedish Red Cross. In the early 1960s when leprosy was a dreaded disease and the afflicted were ostracised and branded as unproductive and unemployable even when trained, the SRC started a light engineering workshop with imported machines suitable for disabled people. When this unit became economically viable they withdrew and the Swedish Red Cross Rehabilitation Industries came into being, giving way in 1976 to the WORTH Trust, with the assets of the SRC passing to the latter.

Today, the WORTH Trust is a multi-locational, multi-dimensional entity spread over 10 acres across Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry. It provides orthotic services, schooling, vocational training and employment to over 600 people with disabilities and its production units turn out industrial components in metal and plastic, fabricate tractor trailers and mobility aids for the handicapped. The aim of the Trust is to provide support but encourage the disabled to lead productive lives among the able- bodied in the mainstream. Their plastics unit which supplies components to wellknown sanitaryware manufacturers, refrigerator stands and tape recorder fronts and backs, has exceeded the goal of matching the work of the able bodied and acquired ISO 9002 certification, the first factory in Asia completely manned by the disabled to achieve this distinction.

It is a completely barrier-free environment. The school and hostels, designed by eminent Chennai architect Chitale, have ramps providing easy access to the upper floors and all toilets have braille markings. The sylvan surroundings house not only the school, physiotherapy centre, training centres for electronics and computers, the brailler project whose export earnings subsidise domestic sales at very competitive rates (because the CKD kits are imported duty-free and also have the export earnings absorb other costs partially, a brailler from here is sold at Rs. 5,900 as against Rs. 30,000 outside) but also a farm that has cows and geese (which meet the requirements of the inmates and excess milk is sold outside) and a garden which maintains itself by the sale of plants.

Malarkodi, tester for braillers, beams with pride as she shows us how every brailler that goes out carries her signature as assurance of quality. It is moving to see the visually and otherwise challenged not only independent but helping others like themselves through the skills that they have learned here. Workers from here are regularly sent for training to Perkins at Boston and they confidently assure me they have no problems either travelling or adjusting to the new environment. There are machines not only to help blind users but also one for the blind and the deaf to communicate. A rehabilitative vocational centre set up with Rotary aid for polio-disabled persons teaches secretarial work along with spoken English skills, computer training, taking dictation and typewriting so that at the end of the course the students are capable of managing a small office. All courses and training are given free and there are a few enlightened, socially conscious industries that absorb them. Some students, severely handicapped, who take up the Electronic training course after acquiring their government recognised national diplomas, set up units of their own, independently handling radio, TV, VCR and VCP repairs.

The mobility aids manufacturing unit has useful products well turned out and with little innovations that ease the life of the user. Workers enjoying a new lease of dignified life recall the way they were shunned and left to fend for themselves and compare it to the care and concern they have received at the WORTH Trust. Persons afflicted with Leprosy (PAL), and now cured, show their affected fingers as mute reminders of their grim past now happily changed. K. G. Lingaraj, afflicted with leprosy at 14, tells us that even his family and community shunned him. It was through the WORTH Trust that he had treatment including surgery at CMC Hospital, Vellore, had learnt to write and worked in the NTT toolroom (he has not forgotten that when he first went to work the other workers put a notice on his machine: "Danger, don't touch this machine"). He then got married and now has five sons, two of them working in Singapore and Malaysia. "I was nobody and did not know where to look for help, nobody invited me anywhere or visited me. Now I have Rs. 50,000 a month with my sons also contributing; I have lived a full life, thanks to the Trust, and have a place of dignity in the community." And he is the first to be invited to every function, his mentors say with satisfaction.

From the group of young hearing-impaired children excited by their ability to make sounds they have never heard in their lives to the assured young men and women engaging their skills with confidence in manufacturing and assembling quality products, and the older men who have grown with the Trust and retired from the professional opportunities they enjoyed there to a secure retirement and an assured place in the sun - they are all living testimony to the grit and determination with which they have carved a life for themselves within the warm and supporting ambience of the WORTH Trust. If the government could speed up and simplify procedures for getting concessions like duty-waivers, and more industrialists would turn socially conscious along with increasing awareness among the public about the real needs of the disabled and the disadvantaged, the work of NGOs like these would multiply the benefits several fold.

Mr. Anthony Swami who heads the Trust sees things changing for the better. "The fact that we are getting fewer applications for training now shows better acceptance in the mainstream," he feels. "Polio is now almost eradicated and there are very few afflicted with leprosy. But we also happen to create more disabled people by rash driving, for example," he adds.

"A rockpile ceases to be a rockpile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing in him the image of a cathedral," says St. Exupery. The vision of dedicated men and women fashions silent miracles out of abject humanity.

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