A homemaker, Ruma Roka started National Deaf Society (NDS) in 2005 from her 2-bedroom apartment with just 5 students. Over the years, NDS has touched the lives of more than 4500 deaf people and placed more than 1200 in various sectors like it, hospitality, banking, retail & production.
A Noida-based non-profit organisation has spent the past 15 years trying to improve the quality of life of the young who live with the invisible disability of being deaf. Ruma Roka, the founder of the Noida deaf society (NDS) has made it her life's mission to make the deaf employable through quality education & specialized vocational training. In the first part of a new series - Changing India, Sauravi Prasai and Shereen Bhan of CNBC-TV18, bring this special story.
A homemaker, Ruma started NDS, in 2005 from her 2-bedroom apartment with just 5 students. Over the years, NDS has touched the lives of more than 4500 deaf people & placed more than 1200 in various sectors like it, hospitality, banking, retail & production.
Ruma now plans to open NDS centres in industrial areas to train people who fall under the economically weaker sections (EWS) category. Currently, NDS has 6 centres across the country in Jammu, Gurugram, Jaipur, Hisar and Noida with 32 full-time trainers. Recently, NDS has inked a tie-up with the skill development and entrepreneurship ministry and is in talks with the national India open school to become a first-of-its-kind centre to train the disabled. Companies like NIIT, Adobe, Axis Bank, Costa Coffee, the Oberoi group not only provide funds and support the technical training programmes, they also proactively hire from NDS. The education and skill development training provided ISL free and NDS is betting on more funds, courtesy the 2 percent mandatory corporate social responsibility (CSR) spend.
In 2012, NDS started a primary and remedial education program for 5 to 12-year-olds to build a strong foundation among deaf children where teaching right from the start is in the sign language. Though it is not recognized as a school yet, the primary section has 65 students enrolled and follows the CBSE curriculum. Going forward, the NDS, a recipient of many awards like the Shell Helen Keller award, hopes to open a state-of-the-art education centre for deaf people.
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