When President Droupadi Murmu delivered her address at the first convocation of the Central Tribal University of Andhra Pradesh in Visakhapatnam in June, Ms. K.V.L. Suchitra Balakrishna stood beside her on the dais, rendering the Hindi-language speech into sign language as it was spoken. “Within a fraction of a second, I was able to translate it,” she said, recalling the moment the Governor, the State’s Education Minister and the Union Education Minister were also present.
Ms. Suchitra, says she signs fluently in five languages, Telugu, Hindi, English, Odia and Bengali, believes that range was why officials chose her for the assignment.
For Suchitra Balakrishna, founder of the Prajwal Vani Welfare Society and Trust, the assignment capped a lifetime around sign language. Her elder sister, Padmaja, is hearing impaired, and the two attended the same special school in the 1990s. A 1996 assignment to choreograph ‘Hum Honge Kamyaab’, a song in sign language for her deaf classmates, she said, convinced her that schools should not segregate children by disability. “This education gave me my livelihood,” she said. “Today, it placed me beside the President of India.”
That personal history has led into advocacy work now sharpened around this year’s International Day of Sign Languages, observed on September 23 under the theme “Declaring Deaf People’s Human Rights”.
The day also marks the World Federation of the Deaf’s 75th anniversary and 20 years since the UN adopted the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Against that backdrop, India’s shortage of trained interpreters, Ms. Suchitra said, remains severe: Visakhapatnam has only two or three, Andhra Pradesh fewer than ten, against an all-India count the Indian Sign Language Research and Training Centre has put it at under 300.
Much of her outreach, she said, has gone into corporate awareness sessions, including for Biocon’s two Visakhapatnam units, and sign-language training in government schools across Parawada for students in Classes VIII to X, an effort she said now covers every school there. She also leads an annual session at NTPC’s summer camp for adolescent girls, hoping repeated exposure will normalise the language beyond the deaf community.
The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016, recognises sign language as a means of communication for the hearing impaired, and Ms. Suchitra argues its provisions, including interpreter positions in government schools, colleges and departments, remain largely unimplemented nine years on. She has been seeking land in Visakhapatnam to expand the training work, a request she said has gone unanswered for close to two decades.
“Give us respect,” she said, speaking of persons with disabilities more broadly. “Not charity. That is all we are asking, for every child.”
