Lending a helping hand

A dedicated trio launches a website to aggregate scribes to write exams for specially abled students in Chennai and all over the country with encouraging results “It is a different issue if students do not study and prepare well for their examinations. But when you are prepared and ready but do not have the right support to write your exams, that becomes another matter altogether”.

This challenging situation which specially abled and visually impaired students confront on a routine basis made two enthusiasts- Vasavi Sundaram and Rajiv Raj- come up with a dedicated website www.iscribe.co.in -in 2007 to aggregate volunteers who would act as scribes for this lot of deserving, yet deprived scholars. Notably, Vasavi is a M Tech from Anna University, Chennai while Rajiv is a physically challenged person, affected by cerebral palsy.

During one of her visits to a specially abled centre, Vasavi was asked whether she could help the visually impaired students write their exams. To meet this requirement, the idea of a website was born. “Today, we have nearly 2000 scribes across India, registered with us as volunteers. Still, we are unable to meet the demand for our services from Chennai city itself.

We feel guilty when we have to deny requests which we get constantly from various institutions. We hope to keep the momentum going and seek more and more volunteers to contact us through our website” says Maheshwari Narasimhan, who is part of the founding team and associated with an organisation ‘Vidya Sagar’ working for the specially-abled.

Maheshwari says: “There are three attributes required for a scribe: Endurance, Patience and Basic Skills. This work is a service, not a business proposition. Moreover, the scribe has to be empathetic and psychologically in tune with the student who would open up only if he/she is confident about her volunteer.” She narrates cases when the students had communication problems when over-enthusiastic volunteers terrified them into clamming up and not being able to dictate what they wanted the latter to write as answers during exams.

Yet another problem, the team faces is when the scribe adds his/her own version to the answers in a bid to help the students do better than what they are actually qualified to be. Despite such niggles, the trio is confident that with a basic knowledge of English anybody could volunteer for this noble work and the team could train them to orient their abilities to serve the target groups. The initiative, as they admit is gaining traction steadily, which goes to prove that humanitarian gestures still have a place in India.

By K Naresh Kumar