Exam boards fail sensitivity test in blind candidates' case

Getting good scribes a problem for examinees

Hemanth (name changed) knows all about the pains of knowing a subject, yet failing in the exam.

A visually challenged student, he sat for a competitive exam where he was assigned a person who didn’t have an idea of arithmetic and logic questions and, as a result, he could not clear it finally.

“Getting good scribes has been a problem since school days,” Hemanth said. “There are restrictions as to who can be scribes for a blind person. It’s usually someone a class below us with a score below 60 per cent.”

He said sometimes the blind candidates appearing for the exam have to pay the scribes between Rs 100 to Rs 150 per paper, but that would hardly be a guarantee for the quality of service.

Indeed, the path for a blind student’s way to higher education or competitive exams is dotted with obstacles of varying kind, the chief one being lack of quality scribes to write their exams. Neither the authorities concerned nor the institutions have done anything considerable to make it easy. 

“There are many who have lost employment opportunities or degree qualifications because of a bad scribe,” said H Nagaraj, formerly a lecturer with a city college and presently a bank officer, who is himself blind.

“First we have to put up with the indifferent exam authorities, insensitive invigilators and sometimes, very bad scribes who either don’t pay attention to the answers we dictate or are reluctant to help in clarifying our doubts. It’s especially difficult to do maths papers with such scribes,” he said.

Efforts have been made by the NGOs to persuade examination authorities to allow computer-based evaluation for the blind, but they have paid little dividend, Nagaraj, who helps the community through National Federation for the Blind (Karnataka), said.

Online route

A few NGOs across the country have tried to leverage the Internet to connect the blind with the right volunteers, but the projects have proved difficult to maintain or cover all the population. Retina India’s ‘scribes and readers project,’ otherwise called Seshpath (www.seshpath.org), is the latest in this initiative.

“This is a national searchable database of both the blind and the volunteers who can find each other and connect offline as well,” said Behram Sethna, a trustee of Retina India, who is using his expertise as a former vice president of TCS to make the project effective.

“There are sections in the homepage where the blind and the volunteers can register. When the blind query for volunteers either for reading or for writing their exams, the site alerts the volunteers closest to the requirement and provides the blind person a list of persons who are willing to help them. He can then choose one of them,” Arvind Bhartiya, another trustee, told Deccan Herald from Mumbai.

The project, supported by IBM as part of their centenary celebrations last year and Vodafone, who had provided their gateway for free to connect the blind and the volunteers offline, is still in its nascent stage.

“We inaugurated this in September,” Behram, also based in Mumbai, said. “Our idea is to put up posters in colleges across the country and get as many student volunteers as possible”.

But Nagaraj felt that the problem needs to be addressed by examination boards and the government.

“There is tremendous lack of clarity as far as the qualifications of scribes are concerned,” he said.

“The government should standardise the process, allow external scribes (brought by the candidates) to undergo standardised tests and prove their credentials. They should also sensitise invigilators and squad members so that they don’t pose more difficulties for blind candidates.”