For the differently abled, a BarrierBreaker to swear by

Rammohan Khanapurkar

Can a physically challenged person fit naturally into a ring of so-called able people?
Negative, most of us would think, though few might admit it. Even those who concede that a physically challenged person can be of resolute character, outdoing an able bodied person in mind and spirit, tend to go by set notions.
So we miss the point. We do not realise that a person without arms, a child with severe orthopaedic issues, a young lady without sight, an old man with low vision, an adolescent with hearing or speech impairment or a housewife without vocal chords also needs to travel, move around, enjoy, socialise and use communication devices. Empower him to do so and a physically challenged person could well fit into a ring of able people.
Enter BarrierBreak Technologies, a company that touches and transforms the lives of differently able people with assistive technologies.
The company has over the years introduced technology that allows a visually impaired lad to do a Google search, or someone with low vision to carry portable magnifiers in classrooms and magnify his or her academic ambitions; technology that allows a paraplegic to stimulate text on the screen with mere eye contact and move his or her imagination and allows a speech impaired person to share views with a pocket-size talking instrument, among other things.
For all that, Shilpi Kapoor – who started BarrierBreak in the late ’90s after a chance encounter with a physically challenged person pricked her conscience – has never run BarrierBreak like a charitable organisation dependent on crumbs of CSR funds and government support. She made it a profitable venture with clean commercial interest, so that she can offer world class technology and pay respectable salaries to her employees.
Kapoor has consciously recruited differently able people in her office. It doesn’t hit you when you enter the premises of BarrierBreak for the first time. Inside its premises, working environment comes across as a normal office with people peering at computers, rapidly using keyboards and doing routine computer related work. The only difference is that (and one has to really go closer to see that) those peering at computer could be visually impaired, those using keyboard could be challenged by speech impairment and those doing routine computer work could be afflicted by something else. Still, the office brims with confidence and ebullience as an office by the able people, of the able people and for the able people.
Unfortunately, most of the products offered by BarrierBreak are imported. There lies a hitch. A simple binocular like glasses which can magnify image and help a low vision person in day-to-day activities, needs to be imported. These glasses are as simple as you can get in terms of product designing. Even so, no manufacturer or designer in India makes these -- a few who tried offered such substandard quality that BarrierBreak was forced to source equipments from international manufacturers – resulting in higher prices of its products.
And that’s not the only point of lament in a country that has, according to the 2011 Census, a good 120 million people with some form of disability or the other.
‘We work extensively for international clients, but there are very few Indian clients using our services’, rues Priti Rohra, an employee of ‘BarrierBreak Technologies’.
The writer is research fellow,
Observer Research Foundation, Mumbai, and can be reached at
rammohan@orfonline.org