Blind workers run call center in India

From Thaindian News July 6:

MUMBAI -- The telephones never stop jangling and the waves go on crashing on the promenade outside. Unperturbed, 20 visually challenged men and women occasionally sniff the salty sea breeze even as their nimble fingers dial telephone numbers. They murmur softly into the phones. The high ceiling room - an old-world structure in the National Association for the Blind (NAB) headquarters off the Worli sea face here - is a call centre.

It is there that the visually challenged men and women, in their 20s and 30s, work with a smile on the corner of their lips.

The pilot project, initiated by NAB exactly one year ago, has been extremely successful.

“The Drashti Project was aimed at training the visually challenged in a way so as to make them tax payers and not tax consumers,” says Clarence Gomes, NAB executive director.

Gomes says for “a visually challenged person there is no such thing as day and night. We started this project to empower them and make them employable. And the call centre is doing that”.

Reena Chadha, project manager, Drashti Project, said: “The project has been successful and now we intend to start a similar project in the national capital in collaboration with the Blind Relief Association of Delhi. Training is on and by next week it will be inaugurated.”

In the NAB call centre, at present there are 20 employees, and “they do not work in shifts as our target is northern India - Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, Punjab and Himachal Pradesh.”

“We have trained them in the north Indian dialect and they focus only on Tata Indicom subscribers, as the project is supported by Tata Indicom, which also provided a special software for the purpose,” says Chadha.