RUBINA KHAN profiles Sound of Silence NGO which empowers students with hearing disability.
Unused phone or old phone has become an array of hope for the Hearing Impaired Child residing in Mumbai. Thanks to Sound of Silence NGO for the launch of various programmes that has empowered more than 5000 students and clocked 9500 hours of training with the help of mobiles IQ of Hearing impaired students. Courtesy goes to Sumit Singh Gandhi who started this as a social internship programme during his MBA years at the SP Jain Institute of Management in Punjab.
“I being a keen enthusiast in conversing and interacting with others came up with an idea of writing a text and showing it to him. This lead to an engrossed conversation of more than an hour which took place daily. As a piolet they gave 10 kids from Pingalwara Ngo in Punjab and taught them to communicate via sms. Today they send 100 sms per day in fluent English. Their IQ has increased from 65 to 90” says Sumit .S. Gandhi founder of SOS NGO.
“The foundation was launched in 2009, with a focus to bring uniformity to communicate of the hearing and speech imparied with the society as India is a huge country and has many variations or dialects of sign languages,” says Anisha Mukhija the Co-founder of SOS.
“Currently we have our foundation in Andheri and we are part of 8 curriculum schools. To manage the training centre we have 3 full time staff and a team of 150 volunteers across Mumbai & Delhi. Where with the help of technology we empowered the deaf students to precise and become independent rather them just binding them with books and poetry to earn a living which is no way sustainable,” she stated.
The foundation not only teaches these students to use latest technologies, but they are equipped and trained to work on Chat Based Customer Support, Search Engine optimization , Social Media Marketing and SMS/Email Marketing.
During our visit to the Ngo, while discussing with the children’s and their parents, we realised that the children are empowered and confident through the programme. Parents stated that their kids are able to communicate with others after being trained at SOS. The children are trained to use mobile phones, where they are taught to answer basic question like favourite colour, food etc via SMS and also taught a lot through social media.
One of the parents says, “My daughter Rajeshwari was in 10th std and had high aspiration of going to college. She started college in her locality, facing difficulties in grasping the new curriculum she approached SOS team members via Facebook to solve her doubts and prepare well for exam. With the help of mobiles and Social Media platforms SOS has been very helpful to my daughter.”
To know more about the work of the foundation we had some discussion with the teachers of SOS. One of the tutor, stated that “children’s are very excited and eager to learn. Interacting with them really makes us realize how fortunate we are to have our senses.”
“We are India’s First Non Voice Contact centre driven mainly through by the deaf, employing the young adolescents and self-funded organisation. we raise our funds for our organisation mainly through Charity and Promotional events , Crowd-Funding Platform like Bit giving and Ketto , Individual donors and corporate funding’s. Our Mission would be accomplished the day we create self-sustainable deaf and mute communities
with communicate and the type much more effective than any of us,” indicated Anisha.
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