Here's why Indian Sign Language needs a wider acceptability in the country

The white walls are rich with graffiti. In the reception area, an animated conversation is on. Everybody is chatting in sign language. My arrival disrupts their conversation. Sensing my handicap — my inability to understand their language — one of them resorts to words. And then I am taken around the place.

I am at the Noida Deaf Society (NDS), a not-for-profit that works with the speech and hearing impaired. Besides vocational courses, the society that operates out of a multi-storey bungalow has a school in the basement for classes from nursery to IV. In this cheerfully lit area, the classrooms are separated by curtains rather than walls as signs replace oral and aural lectures. The lessons are imparted through videos, skilled hand movements and expressive faces.

For the last 15 years, students from areas in and around Delhi have been coming to NDS to study sign language or to be taught in it. The institute is filling a gap that mainstream schools have failed to bridge. In mainstream schools, speech and hearing impaired students are taught through lip-reading and speech therapy, which can limit learning and understanding. Engaging these students in sign language allows them to become proficient in a language they can call their own.

Institutes such as NDS have been trying to make this point for years. Now, things finally appear to be changing, albeit slowly. In 2015, the Indian government set up the Indian Sign Language Research and Training Centre under the social justice and empowerment ministry. And in March this year, the centre released the country’s first Indian Sign Language (ISL) dictionary with over 3,000 signs that are commonly used in academic, legal and medical circles. The idea is to standardise sign language across regions in the country, while also including signs that are culturally unique to India.

It’s a start. However, for large-scale acceptance and equality at a nationwide level, we need more than a dictionary. Nipun Malhotra, founder of Delhi-based Nipman Foundation, which works with persons with disabilities, wants the Indian Sign Language to be declared as the 23rd constitutionally-recognised language. In August this year, Malhotra filed a public interest litigation before the Delhi High Court seeking this. Giving ISL official status by including it in Schedule VIII of the Indian Constitution would be a game changer, he says. In terms of academia, it would change the nature of public service examinations as the candidate would be entitled to answer the paper in any of the officially recognised languages.

A draft policy prepared last month by 46 stakeholders, including 20 education boards, the National Council of Educational Research and Training, National Institute of Open Schooling, Rehabilitation Council of India and ministry of social justice, also proposed that ISL and Braille be made part of the school curriculum for students with hearing and visual disabilities. Following this, the Central Board of Secondary Education has written to all states and various stakeholders for views on the draft policy.

Kindergarten students attend a class at the Noida Deaf Society, a not-for-profit that works with the speech and hearing impaired

However, until these significant changes are effected, institutes such as NDS are trying to do their bit. The Noida society, for example, employs teachers with hearing impairment to build a sense of community. The experience is that students relate to these teachers better, developing bonds that foster a great learning environment.

NDS’s 45 hearing impaired trainers teach and train teachers in other schools as well. They have so far trained teachers in 11 schools in Haryana, Rajasthan and Odisha. NDS has to date partnered with schools such as Sardar Patel Vidyalaya and Tagore International School in Delhi and Pathways in Noida to teach sign language. And, during a student-exchange programme, some 20 students from Pathways visited NDS where they were introduced to sign language by teachers with hearing impairment.

Given that a majority of hearing-impaired children are born to hearing people, there is also a need to encourage the use of ISL at homes and in schools, says NDS founder Ruma Roka. She advises parents to accept their child’s special situation early in life and learn the sign language.

Manju Singh, who did precisely this, says it has taken her relationship with her daughter to another level. Singh, whose teenage daughter Aparna was born with hearing impairment, studied sign language at NDS for three months. She says she and her daughter can now have a conversation that goes beyond discussing basic needs. “She [Aparna] has a good friends’ circle and is always connected with them through video calls. Knowing sign language has also given her a lot of confidence,” says Singh, whose daughter is enrolled in a vocational course at NDS.

About 2,000 former NDS students who received vocational training in computers, finance and soft skills, are now employed with companies such as Nagarro, Genpact, Taj, Lifestyle and Axis Bank. Employees at some of these organisations say they were also encouraged to learn sign language for a more fulfilling communication.

Apart from NDS, there are other formal and informal initiatives that are working to promote sign language. Class X student Mehya Bishnoi and some of her friends from Step by Step School in Noida have taken it upon themselves to “integrate the two worlds”. Bishnoi heard about NDS from her mother and that’s how it started. Today, the children are on a mission to raise funds for NDS by creating and distributing material that will help sensitise people and create awareness about hearing impairment.

Then there are organisations such as the India Deaf Society in Mumbai, which was founded in 1956 by three sign language users. The formation of this society allowed people with hearing impairment from across Mumbai to come together as a community.

At a training centre in the upscale Hauz Khas area of Delhi, deaf students who have passed Class XII are trained in multimedia, accounting and IT for a period of three months. Soft skills such as leadership and management are also ingrained in these programmes.

Alim Chandani, the man behind this programme, was born deaf in Mumbai. After completing his PhD from Gallaudet University in Washington DC, the only university exclusively for the deaf in the United States, Chandani established Centum GRO Initiative, a CSR initiative of Centum Learning, in 2007 to provide deaf adults with quality leadership and management skills.

Chandani says 95 per cent of the teachers and administrative staff employed in pre-school and primary schools for the deaf do not use ISL to teach. Like Roka, Chandani, too, emphasises the importance of early intervention.

He argues that a deaf child is born in a world where there is a lot of audio stimuli. For parents to want their children to become “normal” through the use of hearing implants, aids and speech therapy without turning to ISL is a major disservice to the community, he adds. “Imagine, deaf children are being denied their natural language since parents, teachers, doctors and even the government is not sensitised about the existence and richness of deaf culture, the heritage, the sign language, especially in India. It is a denial of human rights,” he says.

Malhotra was inspired to file the PIL when he saw a hearing impaired cleaning boy in his Delhi office interacting in sign language over video chat with his wife during lunch hour. The man seemed to come alive during these conversations, he says. Malhotra says he realised he was missing out on the conversations with a 2.2 per cent (a conservative estimate) of the Indian population that can’t hear.

“The fact that we have not learnt how to communicate with deaf people is not their disability; it is our disability,” he sums up.