BENGALURU: For 31-year-old Shaheen, every day is a struggle. From helping Bano, her 13-year-old daughter, get off bed to bathing her and helping her get dressed, Shaheen’s life revolves around her daughter.
“Bano is visually and hearing impaired. We enrolled her into a school for blind children, but since she is hearing impaired too, they sent her back. The same thing happened at the school for hearing impaired children,” Shaheen explains. Shunned from both schools, Shaheen herself started teaching Bano sign language at home. “I have developed my own sign language. My daughter needs to learn to communicate,” she says.
Bano, surprisingly, is not a rare case in the city. Mathru, an organisation which runs centres for children with total disability, had identified 28 such children in the city. “Sixteen children have been identified in D J Halli and 12 in the other parts of the city,” says a volunteer. This number, they say, is shockingly less. “We are still identifying such children and have found that there are 40 more such children and we are trying to reach all of them,” the volunteer said.
Parents say such children have been completely neglected. “My son can’t walk or move his hands. Even his neck can’t remain straight. In special schools, they refuse to take care of him because he constantly needs care. And regular schools are not at all an option,” explained Renu, mother of six-year-old Dilip. The result: No schooling for any of them.
Parents say repeated attempts to contact government authorities have yielded nothing.
“They don’t even seem to care that there are children who fall into more than one category of disability. We need special instructors, special census and also equipment for their development,” says Asma Khan. Asma has two children, Hamid (4) and Shoaib (6), who are totally disabled.
In D J Halli, Mathru runs a centre for such children. “We run the centre in a small room of a government school. In addition to space constraints, we have to deal with other children who are very insensitive too. Also, these children need different toilets and places which don’t have sharp edges so that they don’t hurt themselves and also sign language instructors. But there is not much help from the government to get special rooms or any financial benefits for the children,” says Anotema who teaches the children.
(All names have been changed)