Rehabilitation of people with hearing impairment – An overview

REHABILITATION OF PEOPLE WITH HEARING IMPAIRMENT – AN OVER VIEW

Welcome changes are taking place in society’s attitude towards persons with disability. Once regarded as objects of pity and charity, disabled persons are now able to become more productive by tapping their residual abilities and faculties.

While people with locomotor and visual impairments miss no opportunity to present their own case and seek supportive measures best suited to them, the situation of people with hearing impairment is still being viewed from the angle of the benefactor rather than that of beneficiaries. Because hearing impaired persons cannot normally express themselves, hearing persons become their accepted leaders and champions. Since they have little or no say in the matter, they remain the most backward among disabled persons. Further, while one finds advocates, authors, administrators, academicians and doctors in the group of people with locomotor or visual disability, who are articulate advocates for their group, among the hearing impaired persons there are hardly any matriculates. Hence, while chalking out a programme for the rehabilitation of hearing impaired persons, their different needs have to be carefully considered.

For socio-economic rehabilitation, the primary requirements are education and training. In the case of hearing impaired persons, both of these are inadequate. In India, there are hardly a few hundred schools for hearing impaired children, of which only half a dozen are of secondary school level. There are no facilities for college level education. As for training, India can boast of a lone Government Training Centre for the Adult Deaf at Hyderabad. Two other ill equipped and ill-staffed training centres are run by NG0s. The three centres together cannot cater to the needs of more than 200 adult hearing impaired persons at a time, while the numbers who need the training are much larger. With neither education nor training, adult hearing impaired persons are a nightmare for a rehabilitation worker. They are largely incapable of expressing themselves, and with signs and gestures varying from person to person, understanding them is a problem. The resulting communication gap is usually a handy excuse for prospective employers to reject a hearing impaired candidate, even if he is trained in the trade.

Hearing impaired persons in urban and rural areas have different types of problems and need different types of rehabilitation assistance. Because of access to educational facilities in cities, hearing impaired persons in urban areas can get some education, however rudimentary it may be. At least they come to know their names, unlike their rural counterparts. This half baked education does not equip them for gainful employment, but succeeds in giving them airs. As a result, their invariable choice for employment is a government job. The one percent reservation for hearing impaired persons in Government services does help, but only in a limited way. Special Employment Exchanges and Vocational Rehabilitation Centres (VRC) for the Physically Handicapped contribute their bit, though their combined efforts do not even touch the fringe of the problem. The result is that a large number of hearing impaired persons remain unemployed, and are on the live registers of Special Employment Exchanges and VRCs for more than 10 years. If one does get a hearing impaired person to apply for a post in private organisation, it becomes a difficult task to persuade the sceptical employer to accept him.. This is s pity, because hearing impaired persons are generally considered to be excellent workers. They lack only the faculty of speech and hearing, and are capable of doing every type of manual work if properly trained. Additionally, because of their twin physical disabilities, they can attain very high concentration which results in better quality and higher production. Being immune to noise pollution they are ideally suited in factories like textile mills and capsule making units where noise levels are high. Employers who have hearing impaired employees are usually ready to accept more persons from this group, but such employers are few and far between.

At the Delhi Association of the Deaf, out of a thousand and more members, about 10% continue to be unemployed, though half of them are matriculates who also know typing. Unfortunately, their linguistic skills are woefully inadequate and hence it is very difficult for them either to clear the Clerk’s Grade Examination conducted by the Staff Selection Commission to obtain a Government job, or to secure a place in a private organisation. They are reluctant to accept a job involving manual work, preferring a clerical job or that of a peon in a Government office.

The rural scene is not much better. The difference is that in rural areas, hearing impaired persons are thinly spread over a vast area, making any contact with them difficult. Unlettered, untrained and mostly unaware of their very names, the rural hearing impaired population could have posed a serious challenge to a rehabilitation worker. But these very reasons ensure their rehabilitation. It is not uncommon for a rural person to inherit his profession; this is true for hearing impaired persons too. Thus we have hearing impaired barbers, carpenters, farmers, iron smiths and so on, and there is no question of unemployment or stigma. It is the earning capacity that counts. Hearing impaired women, by and large, remain as house wives. This is not to imply that there are no problems for the rural hearing impaired persons. With divisions and sub divisions of family land holdings, many farming families lack adequate land to cultivate. In arid areas, a cultivator has to have a supplementary means of income like dairy farming, poultry farming etc., a difficult task for an unlettered hearing impaired person, involving as it does marketing and other skilled areas of operation. For hearing impaired tradesmen also problems arise from the supply and demand position. Other problems in rural areas are the absence of facilities for medical intervention, language acquisition, education, and self improvement. Besides, rural hearing impaired persons have no idea of the various facilities and concessions extended to them by the Government and are thus unable to have an access to them..

A beginning has been made to address the needs of rural hearing impaired persons with the setting up of Rural Rehabilitation Centres. These are, however, very few in number, and hence not of much help. The staff in these centres are not trained in communication with hearing impaired persons, and are not very helpful. On paper, however, the centres show highly impressive results, as it is essential for their very survival. With the advent of community based rehabilitation (CBR), it is hoped that there will be improvement in the situation of hearing impaired persons, particularly those in the rural areas. In order to be effective where the hearing impaired are concerned, CBR personnel should be trained in different systems of communication such as sign language, gestures, lip reading, finger alphabet etc. To win the trust and confidence of hearing impaired persons, it is essential to ‘talk’ to them in their own language. CBR can play a role in promoting employment in the formal sector, and self employment of hearing impaired persons, apart from providing training in small-scale cottage industries, loan procedures, marketing of finished products etc. for these are the areas in which disabled persons need help the most.

Ideally the CBR personnel should be from already established organisations and institutions of disabled persons. Unhappily, in the case of hearing impaired persons, this would be a problem. Their local organisations, confined to cities, are a disorganised lot, often working at cross purposes. Their all-India bodies have failed to achieve unity among their ranks. However services from organisations and institutions of persons with other disabilities can be readily utilised.