Hearing Impairment is one of the least talked about and probably most misunderstood disability. Unlike other disabilities, it is not immediately visible. On 3rd March every year World Hearing Day is held to raise awareness on hearing loss and deafness, I am sharing my own experiences to throw some light on predicament of people suffering from hearing loss.
According to WHO, Over 5% of the world’s population – or 466 million people – has disabling hearing loss (432 million adults and 34 million children). It is estimated that by 2050 over 900 million people – or one in every ten people – will have disabling hearing loss.
Those suffering from hearing impairment often hesitate to have conversations with people. Particularly in India, most of us are highly judgemental and we label those as rude, arrogant and sometimes as ‘weird’ or ‘crazy’.They also often face insensitivity of others through mockery, being isolated socially, people hesitant to talk to them. I ,myself, have hearing impairment and have been through most of these cases. The plight of hearing impaired is so unheard that they often fall into depression or have extreme low level of confidence. The level of awareness about hearing impairment is extremely low in our country and most people with such weakness continue to suffer in silence. Only things which we know about hearing loss is data and statistics, we rarely talk with such people about their struggles and what they go through on everyday basis.
Recently, as Part of my IAS training, we had Bharat Darshan Program in which we visited various Insitution, public sector, private sector , NGOs among other places as part of my training. Many of these places claimed to be disabled friendly; but what surprised me was that most of these places consider providing wheel chair access as equivalent to considering the place disabled friendly. We need to understand that disability is not just one facets but has multiple facets, and to make these places disabled friendly, we need to cover all the criteria. As a part of our attachment, we were often shown short videos to get to know about the institute which we were visiting but hardly any of them had any form of subtitles.
I am often told that if you don’t understand something, ask for it. But, is it really, so simple to keep on asking for same things again and again? Repeated asking, often leads to embarrassing situations. It also leads to decrease in confidence level. We need to understand that equality is not about getting things only after being asked but having facilities which wold makes things simple for us without asking for it.
Many of us tend to hesitate to wear hearing aids. We have developed the mindset that if a person wears spectacles, it’s normal but those with hearing aids aren’t. We need to brush off such thinking. We need to talk more about these issues. We need to understand that if someone with profound, severe hearing loss is able to communicate with you, we should be more encouraging instead of discouraging and being judgemental that the person has hearing loss still he/she is communicating well.
We need to make our society more inclusive to people with hearing impaired. We need to understand that everyone is not born equal. As a part of my Village Visit Training, I met a young girl of 12 years old who was hard of hearing and could hear only when people say in her ears. She had applied for hearing aids from district administration but her file was stuck. Her teachers told that she is a bright student but has stopped communicating with others owning to her failure to understand the conversation. We need to make our Government Healthcare more efficient to deal with such issues.
Furthermore, it is common belief that the most convenient solution to people who wears hearing aids is to make them sit in the front and voila they would start understanding it all. This may helps some, but not all. I often struggle to understand accents of some people and too loud noise owning to sitting in front and the speaker being on mike, distorts all the sound and as a result I understand very little. We need to understand the phase at which they are able to understand things.
We should always be encouraging to those around us. As such encouraging remarks, do helps in boosting confidence. We need to make workplace, training place comfortable enough for such people.We shouldn’t let hearing loss limit a person’s full potential.
As part of making India more disabled friendly, government gives horizontal reservation to PwD people but are all training institutes, government offices well equipped to work with such people? We can learn from countries like Singapore where every new born receives a hearing test. It is also one of the few countries where even Deaf can drive. When I visited Singapore, I was amazed to see how disabled friendly it is. Places had audio as well as written note for everyone to understand. The government should also think about adding a chapter in the course curriculum to make younger generations understand about people with disabilities.
So, we all should pledge to make our country more accessible to those with hearing loss.
P.S: All the views expressed are my own.
Prranata Aishwarya,
IAS Trainee Officer 2019,
Phase 1- LBSNAA
