Mohammed Asif Iqbal is vice president of Welfare Society for the Blind (WSB), Majerhat, Kolkata. An alumnus of St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata and the Symbiosis Centre for Management and Human Resource Development, Pune, Iqbal lost his vision at age 16. But the disability has driven him to do all he can to make common cause with, and help visually impaired youth by teaching them soft skills and computer technology usage. With 20-25 trainees and five teachers, the society also offers vocational education and training to handloom and handicraft manufacturers and prepares students for government jobs. The courses are of three-12 months duration and students pay a nominal fee of Rs.50 per month.

Newspeg. Earlier this year (March), Mohammed Asif Iqbal completed a Unique Identification (UID) card assignment for Nandan Nilekani, chairman of the high-potential UID project, to devise strategies for including socially marginalised groups and the disabled into ADHAR, the 12-digit number which the Unique Identification Authority will issue to all citizens of India.

History.  Born with 50 percent vision in 1976 in Bhagalpur (Bihar), Iqbal moved to Oregon, USA at the invitation of his uncle, an orthopaedic surgeon, for treatment of his visual ailment diagnosed as retinitis pigmentosa (a genetic condition which causes retinal degeneration and eventual vision loss) when he was 11 years old. However despite “careful and compassionate care”, he eventually lost his vision. At the time, his teacher Norm Jordon taught him the use of Microsoft’s JAWS (Jobs Access With Speech) software which enables blind and visually impaired users with text-to-speech output or by way of refreshable Braille display. With steadfast support from his uncle Dr. M.Q. Hoda, Iqbal graduated from high school averaging a high 89 percent before returning to India in 1995. Back home he became the first visually challenged commerce graduate of St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata and later earned an MBA from Symbiosis.

Meanwhile in 2004 when he presented a paper on ‘IT enabled for disabled’ at an IT conference, Roopen Roy, managing director of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), was sufficiently impressed to make Iqbal a job offer. Currently he is a principal consultant in the consulting practice of PwC.

Direct talk. “In India, the environment is very unsupportive to people with disabilities. I want to spare others like me from the pain and humiliation I had to suffer. Therefore at WSB, we try to mentor and equip them with necessary life skills to enable them to earn a living and support themselves. To some extent, we have succeeded as several of my students are now working in blue-chip companies such as Wipro and IBM,” says Iqbal, the recipient of a state role model award conferred by the governor of West Bengal in 2007, and the National Award for outstanding disabled employee, conferred by the President of India, in 2008.

Future plans. Keenly aware of the challenges of the differently abled, Mohammed Asif Iqbal eventually hopes to become a corporate trainer and motivational speaker. “I honestly believe that given encouragement and appropriate training, people with disabilities are as capable as their non-disabled peers in some vocations. I want to expand the list of these vocations and prove the veracity of this assertion,” says Iqbal.

Wind in your sails!

Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata)