Jyoti is a visually impaired girl who hails from the Honnavar district of Uttara Karnataka, a part of rural Karnataka. Her father is a businessman and mother is a home maker. The community that they belong to does not encourage women being independent. As a result, Jyoti grew up with a lot of challenges and almost no support from her family members. Life was anyways tough for Jyoti whose problems only increased when she started to lose her eyesight two years back. She was diagnosed with Retinitis pigmentosa.

A person with this eye condition experiences deterioration in sight which may result in total blindness. Sometimes it is gradual, while other times there can also be a sudden loss in vision. In Jyoti’s case she lost her vision in span of a year.

Once Jyoti started losing her eyesight her journey of relearning the simplest day to day activities started for her. She was very keen on completing her graduation but with slow loss of eyesight all her aspirations and dreams came to a standstill. She had no idea on how to lead a normal life again and her self-esteem was at her lowest. Her family was dejected. They were not ready to accept their daughter’s disability. They were concerned about her future and this constant worry started to depress Jyoti. With plethora of problems and constant trauma she decided to end her life at a certain point of time.

It was one fine day while trying to know more about her disability she heard the interview of another visually impaired person on television and came to know about Enable India. She was inspired by what she heard which rekindled her hope to succeed and overcome barriers of disability.

She began to gather information about Enable India and then joined the Career Centric Computer Training for visually Impaired –a holistic program at Enable India. The training environment enabled her to shoulder responsibilities from day one. This triggered her need as well as desire to become independent and her confidence increased. The Mobility training that aims to train candidates to move independently helped Jyoti to travel independently, overcome her fear and also use the white cane as a solution to be independent while travelling.

Jyoti has now started to overcome her inhibitions of communicating in English through the spoken English sessions that encourage her for public speaking, news reading, etc. The visits to different organisations have helped her gain exposure to corporate culture. This has resulted in fueling her aspirations once again. Today Jyoti has become a confident girl with set goals and dreams. She has done exceptionally well and has now got selected and is ready to be on board with Enable India as an Intern- trainer.

Enable India is OneStage validated and supported NGO aided by our corporate partner Microsoft through our workplace giving programme Give As You Earn.