Meet of youths with hearing defects, parents

BANGALORE: Association of People with Disability (APD) is organising Inchara, a four-day congregation of hearing challenged young persons and their parents, from May 16 to 19 to promote their social inclusion for achieving equality and justice. Around 400 people (300 hearing challenged children and 100 parents) are expected to take part in the congregation, according to the                 organisers.  Addressing a press conference, Director of the programme K N Gopinath said, “This would be a platform for young persons with hearing disabilities and their parents to express their challenges and aspirations, network with peers and other stakeholder groups and interact with experts and resource persons to understand issues and avenues for development.”“Sign language which they use to communicate is rarely understood by the general public and in most of the places, these people live in isolation,” he observed. The rate of dropouts is high among these persons as they cannot hear what the teacher is teaching and have difficulty in clarifying their doubts. “They can study up to 7th standard maximum and only a few hearing challenged students appear for SSLC examination,” he stated. The members of the organisation also made it clear that they will be appealing to the government to appoint school teachers  who can understand and communicate in sign language.