A top banker set up a special classroom for autistic children in a New Delhi school. The model is now ready for replication in other schools.
When your month-old infant stops looking into the distance and stares into your eyes for the first time, it is a moment to cherish. But when your child is never able to look into your eyes, leave alone smile at you, nothing can be more painful.
One of the most telling sign of a child born with autism, which impairs their ability to interact socially, is inability to have eye contact or communicate.
Their eyes are lost somewhere as if they live in another zone. They are creative, intelligent, but cannot relate to the world like others. They need a classroom and teachers equipped to interact with them.
The Indian education system, public or private, is yet to wake up to their needs.
Many parents in India are learning to come to terms with absence of classrooms for their autistic sons and daughters or bear tearfully the fact that their beloved child has to be put along with children with other disabilities, barely getting the attention he or she deserves.
When Sameer Nayar, the managing director of Credit Suisse Bank, left New York recently and came to New Delhi, he had a single mission. He wanted to have a classroom for every autistic child in the country. His own seven-year-old son was autistic and could not find a classroom in the national capital.
He finally decided to set up one for him. Today, the classroom he had helped to set up in Vasant Valley School in New Delhi is set to be a blue-print for similar classrooms in other schools.
It is called the Blue Room, set up by the Special Child Trust, founded by Nayar. The other trustees are Union Commerce Minister Anand Sharma and the director of the school.
The trust is his way of serving the cause of special children. He says as a banker, he is good at raising funds and so is busy raising money for those who are serving the cause of children with special needs.
The Blue Room is a dream classroom for autistic children. It has five students, all autistic, and five teachers. Nayar says initially, he brought a teacher from New York to start the facility.
Today, there is just one classroom in the school for children aged five-seven. Next year, the school is expected to begin a classroom for those in the eight-eleven age group and then another for those in the 12-14 age group and so on, says Nayar.
Nayar is ready to take the Blue Room model to schools in New Delhi and outside as the pilot project has been completed and continues as a permanent asset in the school. His trust has documented the whole process, the teaching methods, the curriculum and all other details that are needed to replicate the model. The manual can be used by other schools. His trust is ready to not only help any institution with guidance but also with funds, if necessary.
Nayar says the trust will also help the interested institutions get faculty, besides training them to international excellence and ensuring that the children receive world-class intervention and therapies. For many little children in the country, that is a day to look forward to.
