BHUBANESWAR: Sanyas Behera, the first visually challenged man of the State to have cracked the Odisha Administrative Services (OAS), is ready for the daily grind at office.
The man, who fought against all odds and paved way for visually-challenged persons to appear in the State’s civil services examination, joined as the training reserve officer at Puri Collector office on Wednesday.
He was explained about the office rules by Additional District Magistrate Sumant Kumar Das. He will now receive training for seven months.Behera had single-handedly taken on Odisha Public Service Commission (OPSC) which had disallowed persons with disabilities (PWDs) from appearing in the civil service examinations. He knocked the doors of the State Administrative Tribunal in 2006 and waited for a hearing which did not happen for the next five years.
In 2011, he filed a PIL before the Orissa High Court which asked OPSC to include visually-impaired candidates in 2014.However, in 2015, OPSC came out with its OAS advertisement which did not include the visually challenged. Behera went to the State Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities after which OPSC was forced to change its notification by way of an amendment to the rules.
Behera took the test and in February he qualified for OAS. An alumnus of Bhima Bhoi School for the Blind in Bhubaneswar, Behera says his fight for the rights of persons with disabilities will continue.
“The test-to-speech (TTS) software in Odia is yet to be officially brought out although the Ministry of Human Resources Development had assigned the job to Utkal University. It is very essential for the visually challenged in day-to-day office work. In absence of TTS, they would need human assistance,” he says.He also wants the speech-to-text software to be introduced by the State Government while emphasising the need for a uniform scribe policy. Behera is just started.