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As exams near, DU’s visually challenged students keep fingers crossed
New Delhi: Deepak Kumar Gupta, a final-year postgraduate student studying English in St Stephen’s College who has complete visual impairment, is extremely worried
New Delhi: Deepak Kumar Gupta, a final-year postgraduate student studying English in St Stephen’s College who has complete visual impairment, is extremely worried as his exams will start from July 1 and he has no help.
“Forget about scribes helping us write our papers. During this pandemic, nobody wants to help us cross the roads even. Even if we receive reading material now, we have only a week to prepare for multiple subjects,” he said while speaking over the phone from Nokha, a small town in Rohtas district of Bihar and his native place.
“Colleges have said only students in Delhi can be helped with scribes. How can we come to Delhi when there is a visible Covid-19 spike in the city?” said the 23-year-old, who also secured his undergraduate degree from DU.
With a week left for the university’s first online open-book exams, Delhi University on Monday asked its colleges and departments to provide assistance to visually challenged students with scribes, reading material, and assistive devices.
“The principals of colleges and heads of departments will make their best efforts to arrange scribes for students of Visually impaired appearing for examination as per prior information received from such students as per date sheet notified in OBE mode for academic session 2019-20,” said the notification signed by Dean (Exams) Vinay Gupta on Monday.
The development comes after the Delhi High Court last week asked final-year undergraduate and postgraduate visually impaired DU students to try to sit for the open-book online exam, while stating that the cost of any book or assistive device they buy for the examination will be reimbursed up to Rs 2 lakh.
The court directed that “the visually impaired students may approach their respective institutes/colleges for any assistance required, including reading material/textbooks in an accessible form and assistive devices”. It said that visually impaired students should be allowed to take a second round of the open book exam in September if they want to improve their score.
However, the implementation of the order is proving to be challenging, said SK Rungta, general secretary of the National Federation of the Blind, and a petitioner in the case. “Students have come to us with complaints that the responses they are receiving are not satisfactory and not all required reading material is available in an accessible format,” Rungta said. “They have not been able to study or even attend the online classes and are now expected to appear for their papers.”
Preevi Singh, 20, a final-year undergraduate student currently staying in Varanasi, said visually impaired women students might find it particularly difficult to appear for their exams due to multiple reasons, including travelling to Common Service Centres (CSC) providing information technology support or navigating through domestic issues. The English student hasn’t been able to find out her nearest CSC using the link provided by the university since the notification itself is not in the accessible format and neither is the application.
“During regular college days, we go to the university’s Equal Opportunity Cell and get our books scanned. That is not possible now. Our college has made efforts to help us but it isn’t enough,” said the Miranda House student. “The move to conduct exams will affect our higher education and employment prospects because the retest, if that happens, will take place in September. Till that time, we have to make do with these results, which will not work out well for us.”
Dean (Exams) Vinay Gupta said, “We are coordinating with CSCs to arrange for scribes for students who will not be able to reach Delhi for their papers. As far as reading material is concerned, we have asked principals and heads of the departments to provide reading material to students and have made provisions for students to access Saksham, an NGO that provides online learning material for the visually impaired.”
