The deaf shall not drive: Centre tells Delhi High Court

This definitely is not good news for the roughly five crore (50 million) hearing-impaired people in India. Two months after telling Delhi High Court that it was considering allowing the deaf in India to drive, the Centre did a U-turn on Wednesday. This time, the government told the court that, in the light of poor road manners in India and the frightening accident rate — the highest in the world — the hearing impaired cannot be given licences. Jyoti Singh, the counsel for Road Transport and Highways Ministry, said before a bench of Chief Justice A P Shah and Justice S Muralidhar that the decision was taken at a meeting of the special meeting of Central Motor Vehicles Rules- technical standing committee convened on December 9, 2009. The court is hearing a public interest petition by the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) seeking a direction to quash the requirement of having ‘no hearing impairment for the issuance of driving licence’.
The archaic Motor Vehicles Act prohibits the deaf from obtaining a driver’s licence, saying they could be a ‘source of danger to the public’. NAD’s lawyer and human rights activist Colin Gonsalves had contended that the hearing impaired are allowed to drive in all but 26 countries.
He said, in the UK, Australia, Germany, Belgium, Thailand and Malaysia, authorities only insist on special double rear-view mirrors. In Malaysia and Sri Lanka, this category of drivers are to indicate the handicap by putting a sticker on the back of their cars, so that other drivers do not hoot. But they are not allowed to drive commercial or passenger vehicles. “Indian roads are far more hazardous than of those countries mentioned by the PIL,” the committee concluded.

N commandos to learn sign language at school for the deaf

Vivek Narayanan | TNN


Chennai: They have learnt combat from the US Marines and tactics from war veterans. Now, they will learn a vital mode of communication from a Chennai-based school for the deaf. Personnel of the Tamil Nadu Commando Force will take lessons from the CSI Higher Secondary School here on sign language to communicate with each other during anti-terrorist operations . The 40-day training will begin on January 18.
NSG commandos, like their counterparts in the US Marines and Navy Seals, have their own sign language , but each sign conveys only one word or an idea. The sign language of the hearing impaired, on the other hand, can be used to quickly convey meanings of long sentences , a vital attribute for commandos during high-voltage operation. For example, using sign language, it takes barely five seconds to convey the sentence you go upstairs, I will follow you with more ammunition.
We have shortlisted a vocabulary of 1,000 words, which the commandos will be trained in, said a senior officer.
The aim of the course is to evolve a common pattern of signs corresponding to various situations , which the force is likely to encounter during a terror attack. When a platoon tries to attack a terrorist base, we cannot use communication equipment as it might alert the enemy. This is where sign language comes in; members of the platoon will be able to communicate with each other on the positions of snipers, number of terrorists and the kind of weapons they have, said the officer. Incidentally, during the 26/11 attacks, the terrorists were unable to decipher the signs used by the NSG forces.
CSI School headmaster J Justin is excited about the training programme, especially since his students will have an opportunity to meet the special forces personnel. Our students will be motivated to see them. I conducted a one-day training for the commandos about 45 days ago. They grasped things easily and were keen on learning sign language.

News published by Times of India on 27/11/2009