12 people with disabilities get to intern with tech major
When 12 wheelchair bound people gazed in wonder as they made their way inside the huge glass doors of a building recently, they were scripting a new chapter in the city's techsector: They were part of the first batch of an internship programme rolled out by a tech-park for persons with profound disabilities! EMC Corporation near Doddanekundi on Outer Ring Road ushered in the disabled persons as part of "Redefine Abilities" -a one-year internship programme geared at taking disabled persons one step closer to their career path and making them financially independent.EMC India, with the support of Enable India, a non-profit organisation, had identified 12 interns for both technical and non-technical projects.
The excitement was evident when they stepped in early this week. While many maintained that they were always intrigued about what happens behind the glass facade of the swanky buildings that houses IT companies, 45year-old Arun Adhyam, who suffers from cerebral palsy, said: "I want to be a part of an MNC because it will help me become punctual." He is joined by Avinash Sonnad who added: "Not just that, I want to prove myself." Son nad is a cerebral palsy patient who has completed his BCA course from Christ University. The Redefine Abilities pro gramme was jointly con ceived by Deepa Narasimhan -a profoundly disabled per son herself who works at EMC. In an interaction with BANGALORE MIRROR on why she started this programme, she says: "I felt very successful at my workplace and this is where we decided to bring in more people and help them become as independent as I feel."
Simply put, a profoundly disabled person is someone who suffers from multiple dis abilities, making that person heavily dependent on other people. For example: 30-year old Pradeep Sinha from Kol kata is both deaf and blind. The only way he communi cates with people is through sign language, holding hands with the speaker. However, the interns pre sent proved to be tech savvy and used a variety of assistive tools such as speech recogni tion software, word predic tion software, magnifiers for better viewing and even a de vice which uses eye control for navigating the mouse in computers to keep pace with grasping everything they were being taught. The tech nological assistance was pro vided by charitable trust En able India, co-founders of the internship programme.
Most of the interns in the group had no experience in the corporate sector. Some of them made their living through part-time jobs or tak ing tuitions. Here they made their first foray into the corpo rate world by learning appli cations related to TeamView er, Skype and Dropbox to communicate with each oth er, as the programme was set to go virtual after three days.
Source : Bangalore Mirror , 28th Nov 2014
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