More than three years ago, when the Kerala government began the Youth Innovation Programme (YIP) to encourage entrepreneurship, they made a disturbing observation. Among all the young participants coming forward with their innovative ideas, there was no person with disability. It was clear that there had to be a different set of facilities for all those persons with disabilities who had the ideas with them but not the support system. That’s how, in 2019, the Innovation by Youth with Disabilities – IYwD – programme was started by the government. Two years and a pandemic later, they are ready to invite their second batch of innovators.
“The Kerala Development and Innovation Strategic Council or K-DISC which began YIP, is also behind IYwD. They approached the National Institute of Speech and Hearing (NISH) for implementing it. The problem was that deaf people needed interventions in sign language, accessible places to work. So did the blind. You need separate support systems for people with disabilities. That’s how the government approaches NISH,” says Daisy Sebastian, project director of IYwD.
The first camp for IYwD was conducted in March 2019 at Kanthari – an institute that promotes social entrepreneurship among people with disabilities. They had conducted a talent search, calling people with disabilities with talents (singing, dancing included) and innovative ideas to come for the camp. The target age group was between 16 and 40. As many as 180 applications came, out of which 30 were chosen.
“Among those, only 19 participated. We began from scratch – from helping them identify ideas they could work on, to where to get training from, arranging mentors, brainstorming and so on. Three camps were conducted in 2019. Two of the participants have developed a solid idea with the help of mentors,” says Daisy.
Ajay and Shankar, both persons with disabilities, have developed the prototype of a product they want to develop – an assistive device for physiotherapy. “It means that after the initial help of a physiotherapist the device can be used by the clients independently. The physiotherapist can access it remotely,” says Ajay, who has had a spinal cord injury during his second semester of engineering, which weakened his limbs.
Shankar too developed a problem with his legs after an accident. His is the business brain behind their project, Ajay says. “Helping us with everything is a third team member, Maneesh Raj, who we depend on for all the movement.”
The team hopes to begin an organisation – called Livable – to develop assistive devices that could not only help people with disabilities, but everyone in need of them, such as the elderly. Their mentors are Koruthu Varughese of SCTIMST (Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences & Technology) and Avaneesh.
All of this is for free, coming as part of the programme. “Everything was going well when COVID-19 struck last year. We used this time to prepare online videos and develop the course. There are some 108 short online videos now with which we hope to begin training for the second batch of IYwD. We have called for applications now,” Daisy says.
Registrations can be done with messages (saying IYWD) or missed calls to the number 6238848716 or with emails to iywd@nish.ac.in.