AGRA  CONVENTION 2014

Blind Stars Beyond Facebook Bridging The Gap

7th to 9th November, 2014

Session 4
Mainstreaming of Blind Child Specially the Girl Child – Role of the Family and Key Challenges:

The key speaker of this session was Mrs. Preeti Monga, renowned motivational speaker. Taking forwards the spirit of this session, a group of delegates was visiting schools educating blind girls to interact with them and motivate them.

‘Mainstreaming’ as a concept was discussed as being the very manifestation of a discriminatory attitude towards a specific group. ‘Marginalization’ begins with family and then it turns into a collective effort of the society to discriminate against anyone who is different. This leads to the visually impaired person to consider himself/herself as someone outside of the mainstream.

Why is ‘mainstreaming of the blind girl child’ such an important issue? Because the society has always treated women as its ‘second class citizens’. Especially in a patriarchal society like India, a girl child is seldom welcome in majority of the sections, and to be a ‘blind girl child’ at that is something that the Indian society still does not understand how to deal with. The question of ‘who would marry a blind girl’ starts haunting the parents of such a girl from the day she is born. But who is responsible for this perception? Clearly, there has always been a wide gap between the various sections of the society that has given rise to this contempt. The visually impaired people have their doubts about sighted people and vice-versa, because that gap has never been bridged.

This gap has lead to an attitude of sympathy towards the visually impaired as well as people with other forms of disability. The gap could only be bridged with effort from both the sides. Sensitization on the part of the able-bodied people as well as a sense of self-worth on the part of people with disabilities is what is required.

Read the report – Agra Convention 2014 – Report – HTML with Audio/Video