Tiruparankundram MLA offering help to visually-challenged Puranasunthari
MADURAI: Tiruparankundram MLA P Saravanan has offered to help M Puranasunthari (25), a visually-challenged person from Madurai who recently passed Civil Services Examination, by sponsoring Rs 3-lakh-worth OrCam, an advanced wearable assistive device that reads and verbalises texts and pre-programmed images.
Puranasunthari, a resident of Mani Nagar in Madurai, secured 286th rank in the Civil Services Examination. Speaking to TNIE, MLA Saravanan said, "Puranasunthari lost her vision at the age of six. She has passed one of the toughest examinations with the help of audiobooks and her mother (who used to read out for her). Meeting her to congratulate her in the first week of August and witnessing her plight prompted me to help her through Surya Trust."
On Saturday, the MLA took Puranasunthari for a ophthalmic examination at Aravind Eye Hospital. "At the hospital, the doctors suggested OrCam. The device resembles a spectacle and costs around '3 lakh. It is to be imported from abroad in three weeks. At the hospital, she underwent a trial using the device on Saturday. Since the assistive device reads out texts in English and a few other languages, I have sought help to develop a software to read texts in Tamil as well," he said.
She would also be given a Rs 20,000-worth Orbit Reader that enables easy learning through Braille, he added.
With Puranasunthari set to leave for Mussoorie for a training at Lal Bahadur Shastri Academy of Administration in three weeks, arrangements are being made to hand over the assistive devices before her departure. "If Puranasunthari had access to these assistive devices earlier, she would have obtained a better score certainly. Having understood the need for awareness on such assistive devices, efforts would also be simultaneously taken to popularise them among the masses," the MLA pointed.