19-yr-old rewrites exam rules for disabled students

19 year old Jaswinder Singh Sodhi has just provided a hope for the disabled to pursue a career in computer engineering. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: May 5, 2011, 23:17:17 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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19 year old Jaswinder Singh Sodhi has just provided a hope for the disabled to pursue a career in computer engineering. Suffering from cerebral palsy, like 25 lakh other children in India, Sodhi has convinced the government to change its archaic rule of allowing a person to write answers on behalf of a disabled student.

Now, the government will allow disabled the option to use modern aids such as computers, to answer question papers, apart from a writer.

Sodhi will be the first student affected by cerebral palsy in India to have an option, including CAD, to answer the engineering drawing question paper on May 13, courtesy the HRD ministry.

"We will ask University Grants Commission to prescribe modern aids for the disabled students to appear in examination for different streams," a senior HRD ministry official said.

Jaswinder’s parents JS Sodhi and Neelam Sodhi, both doctors by profession, realised in November 2010 that a writer will not be able to understand instructions of their son for the engineering drawing paper at his college Guru Nanak Dev Engineering College, Ludhiana.

A child with cerebral palsy cannot draw like normal children because of limited control over hands and therefore Sodhis wanted authorities to allow Jaswinder to use Computer Aided Design (CAD) used by majority of architects and engineers.

“Despite modern aids being available government is forcing disabled students to depend on a writer," said Javed Abidi, who runs the Disabled Rights Group.

Neelam Sodhi told HT that they were not asking for relaxation in the question paper but wanted a system to test their son’s "intelligence correctly".

That was beginning of a long and tiring journey for Jaswinder and his parents.

They knocked the doors of technical education bureaucracy at each level – the college, Punjab Technical University, Punjab government and the All India Council for Technical Education --- but failed to get a favourable response.

"Sometimes it had been very insulting, degrading and frustrating. We have cried a lot when nobody listened," she recalled, in an emotionally choked voice.

Finally, additional secretary in HRD ministry Sunil Kumar came to their rescue. Kumar in this April asked the vice chancellor of the university to provide all help to Jaswinder to his disability and enable him to appear in the examination for engineering drawing.

“Kumar’s letter worked,” Sodhi said on Wednesday, after a meeting with the vice-chancellor.

The university has asked the college to provide Sodhi with the option to use CAD for appearing in the examination on May 13 and decided to have a new examination policy for disabled students in Punjab.

The Jaswinder case has again highlighted the government’s apathy towards disabled people, despite several pronouncements.

The Central government decided that there will be a special unit in education regulatory bodies such as UGC and AICTE to enable the disabled to get higher education during the 11th five year plan ending in March 2012.

The government also ratified the UN convention for disabled in 2008, making a similar declaration.

"Everything has remained on paper," Abidi said.

“I hope Jaswinder would have stirred the government into action”.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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