On 11 June 2014 at UNICEF House, participants of the Global Partnership on Children with Disabilities learning and advocacy event prepared for a public speaking role about their lives, their disabilities and their dreams of inclusion for persons with and without disabilities.

 

Kartik Sawhney, 19, was born in India and is the recipient of many prestigious awards for his academic achievements. Currently a sophomore on full scholarship at Stanford University [California, USA] majoring in Computer Science, he is involved with young voices in India advocating for the rights of persons with disabilities. Born with Retinopathy of Prematurity, he has faced many challenges, but he has been proactive about his education and participation in school and social activities.

 

“When we talk about inclusion most people think it is basically including people with disabilities in mainstream education,” he says. “When I think about inclusion, I think of persons with disabilities actually communicating and participating with other students having the same resources and opportunities to succeed and have a holistic education as others. When I was in high school, I made it a point to participate... I was never told that I could not participate in sports or activities that was not really thought of as suitable for someone who was blind. Rather the teachers who were responsible for the activity were always up for taking up the challenge and devising alternative methods to include me in everything possible.”

 

“Persons with disabilities have always relied on innovations from others to accomplish the most basic tasks. Can you believe a person with disability actually being an innovator? “Science, technology, engineer and mathematics, these 4 words that have changed the world today are considered to be the four edges of a geometric figure that is not supposed to be touched by someone who is blind or visually impaired. But what happens if someone is really passionate about these subjects and really wants to pursue them? Should they be denied an opportunity simply because the world thinks that these subjects are too visual to be managed by someone who is blind?”

 

When he was in the 10th grade, he had to choose an educational track… “Everyone around me including some of my friends and teachers advised me to go for subjects including law and music simply because these subjects were far less technical and would not involve any visual inputs,” he says. “I was very confident about my choice and wanted to pursue science, no matter what. I wrote letters to the educational board in India and after 9 months finally got permission to pursue sciences, as India’s first blind student to do so. But that definitely was not the end of challenges for me. I soon realized that science was full of diagrams and other equations that were extremely challenging for me to handle especially because there was no assisted technology in India at that time. How do I go about doing that now? I was shattered and I almost thought that perhaps what people had been telling me before I made this decision were actually correct, and I’d better change my stream.”

 

“That is when a thought struck me. Who creates technologies? You? Me? Yes, people like us. So what if I cannot buy the expensive technologies that can enable me to study sciences? I can make my own technology. I can help me and other students like me in developing a world to understand science. That is when I came up with a suite of software that I call “STEM Made Easy” which consists of 2 suites, the first [is] a programme called “Audio Graft Describer,” which takes an equation corresponding to a curve and converts it to its audio tonal representation…I’m passionate about music too. And that is when I thought, well, let’s use music to understand graphs. And I came up with this software that uses 21 musical notes and using the variation in the frequencies, conveys how the graph is laid out.

 

The second software that I created is called: “Verbal Image Describer” that allows users to upload textbooks and then add descriptions for images in that textbook. The main advantage of this software was that [it] reduces the dependence on sighted assistants for understanding images.”

 

Kartik also came up with an alternative convention along with assistance from his teachers, which supplements the standard convention that chemists use for representing organic chemistry molecules, written in such a way that anyone unfamiliar with the convention can understand it…

 

“But the main point is that we often associate people with disabilities as consumers of innovation. But people with disabilities can well be producers or generators of innovation as well. What is required though is an opportunity to innovate, an opportunity to experiment, and an opportunity to pursue one’s passions. And who is it that will provide this opportunity? You.

 

Asked about inclusion and how we ensure that no one is left behind in employment and education, Kartik responds: “It often happens that we have to face insensitivity from the government, from educational bodies, from our classmates too but I think that rather than simply blaming it on the government to do something on our behalf or expecting the NGO’s to do something, we also have an important role to play. Disability is nothing more than a nuisance. You can do pretty much anything that you [want to] do, just show them.