June 26, 2019
A social media thread on the barriers faced by people with visual
disabilities at exam halls has triggered an important conversation on the
larger systemic barriers faced by people with disabilities when it comes to
the exam system. That’s our focus on Story of the Week.
When Mumbai-based digital marketing executive Harsh Gupta
volunteered to scribe for a visually impaired person at the recent
State Bank of India Clerk Prelim Exam, he was unaware of the
nightmare many disabled students routinely experience. He encountered
firsthand the many barriers that make the process exclusionary – from
inaccessible halls, to rude officials to exam papers.
This moved him to share a series of tweets recounting what he saw. While
familiar to most in the disabled community, the experience shared by a
non-disabled person, has helped trigger an important conversation.
“I would never have known how bad it was unless I had volunteered” Harsh
told NewzHook. “This was my first time and I was expecting
to receive some information, but I found officials there borderline rude.
When I shared my experience with a friend, he urged me to write about it”.
In a series of tweets – https://twitter.com/harsh6363/status/1142694845766492160?s=19
– Harsh has documented in detail the various systemic barriers. From the poor
security arrangements for belongings, the over 120 people packed into a hall
meant for 60, to question papers framed in a hard to process manner, the
details highlight the systemic barriers faced by disabled students.
Another first-time scribe at a different SBI exam centre, Shayonee
Dasgupta described it as a “disaster waiting to happen”.
There was no counter at the gate and hundreds of students were standing
cluelessly, not knowing where to go. The building has couple of entrances
and I spent a good 10 minutes understanding how to enter..The level of the
questions in the reasoning and Math sections was difficult. I had to wait
for G to comprehend and then tell him the question and the options. I
couldn’t go too slow because there were 20 minutes for 35 questions. Some
of these questions took me a couple of minutes to understand. –
Shayonee Dasgupta, Content writer
Eventually the person Shayonee was writing for could not complete his paper.
“We barely covered five of 21 questions”, Shayonee told
NewzHook. “I had to keep explaining the square roots and
the experience made me realise how privileged I was to have sight. The entire
system is only for the abled”. These experiences are hardly new. One person
responded to Harsh’s tweet saying his mother said the same words nearly 40
years ago when she volunteered as a scribe. A shameful state of affairs as
disability rights activist Nipun Malhotra points out, who
went through several harrowing experiences like these. One of them was during
an entrance exam at the prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru
University in New Delhi.
“My writer was disqualified last minute and my school going brother who had
come to drop me for the exam had to fill in. My brother was a little kid who
had just tagged along on his break from boarding school. He sat hungry to
write a four-hour exam. And the writer had fully fitted into the defined
criteria, approved by the university but wasn’t allowed to write”.
As Malhotra puts it now, “If I hadn’t given the exam, I don’t know what
would have happened to my life. I was lucky that my brother was dropping me.
What If he hadn’t been there to drop me? The point is that education really
empowers people with disabilities and puts them on an equal footing with
others. If this is going to become inaccessible, what is going to happen?”
What such repeated instances highlight is the complete lack of respect for
people with disabilities.
“There was a recent case in Uttar Pradesh of a visually impaired student
who went with a scribe to take an exam”, says disability rights activist
George Abraham. “Now the rule was that the scribe should
be a class 12 pass but not a graduate. In this instance, the scribe was in
his first year of college, but the invigilator decided he could not sit. It
is all very arbitrary”.
The Twitter thread, Abraham hopes, will lead to some concrete measures to
improve the exam system for people with disabilities. One of the suggestions
made is to have question papers in Braille for visually impaired candidates.
“Braille, with due respect has played its role”, points out Abraham.
“You will then have to find someone who reads Braille and can transcribe
the paper, and this again makes it an exclusive club”.
The way forward, he believes, is digital. “If we are looking at becoming
part of the mainstream, scribes need to be phased out and the exam system
should become digital. The whole word is going digital so why not explore
this space?”, he suggests.
That still does not address the larger problem, the utter callousness shown
towards people’s efforts and dignity. A system that as Harsh puts it, is
designed to disabled people with disabilities even further.
Source: https://newzhook.com/story/22641
