CHANDIGARH: The deaf and speech-impaired people often run into problems in their professional lives owing to absence of quality education facility for them. Hence, better school and college education for them to be self-dependent. In fact, separate training programmes for these people should be designed, which should be conducted by teachers using sign language. This are what Dr J S Saini, professor and head of centre for physically challenged person, National Institute of Technical Teachers Training and Research found out from the study his team conducted with the deaf and speech-impaired employees of banks.
Dr Saini submitted the case study to the National Institute for Speech and Hearing (NISH) last week so that the implementation of the suggestions can result in improvement in the opportunities for the deaf and speech-impaired people. He said the case study was conducted in 2016, when a number of such bank employees participated in a conference held in NITTTR.
During the study, a questionnaire consisting of 16 questions were filled by 56 bank employees of 16 organisations across the country. Most of them were from Maharashtra and Karnataka, while rest hailed from Punjab, Gujarat, Orissa, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, Chennai, West Bengal and Chhattisgarh.
The respondents of the study held various positions in the banks. Two of them were managers, 14 deputy managers, 24 clerks, 3 peons and 13 were single window operators in various organisations.
While responding to the questionnaire, the deaf employees shared their experiences of isolation at work. They said they do not get as many opportunities to grow as the other employees. Besides this, there is hardly any deaf instructors available to train the deaf and speech-impaired bank employees. There are no dedicated training programs for them in banks. In fact, they are not even included in most of the training programmes which adversely affects their career growth. On top of this, they are forced to put in longer hours as compared to others. Majority of them claimed that they are made to work beyond routine working hours.
They also reported that the behaviour of the colleagues remains unfriendly and rude. Often, reporting to a deaf employee as a junior does not go well with the other employees.
They deaf and speech-impaired bank employees to also find it difficult to get accustomed to the advanced technology used in bank jobs, without the help of any sign language interpreter. No special software and in that case, special training programmes are designed for them to ease their difficulties.
The team also found that almost half of the respondents were conversant with their local language, but were unable to communicate in English. Most of them were also unable to write a complete sentence in English. Hence, communication through reading and writing was also a large problem for them. Analysis of the data revealed that the majority of the deaf-mute bank employees are educated but not well-versed with writing English.
The deaf and speech-impaired staffers claimed that they have already forwarded many suggestions to the Government of India but in vain. Suggestions given by them were not taken into account by the government which makes them feel helpless. They feel that there is no point in making such suggestions to authorities, they said.
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