A World Sans Braille: How Northeast’s visually challenged people were left behind

It takes a two-hour drive from Meghalaya’s capital, Shillong, to reach Jowai, the Jaintia Hills district headquarters, and another hour to reach Larissa’s village, Pediniadaw. 

The drive takes you through winding green valleys dotted with fir trees. The road to the village is smooth until the village appears. Once the village comes into view, gravel crunches under the tyres. 

A Village Without a Word for Braille

There are colourful houses scattered along the path to Larissa’s house, with spacious lawns and backyards filled with corn plants. Set against the backdrop of the Jaintia Hills, the village looks like a scene from a postcard, with mist clinging to the peaks in the early morning. However, Larissa’s life is far from picturesque.

Larissa is 31 years old, a mother of five children, and has been blind since she was two. Her maternal aunt, who came to translate the interview, said Larissa’s parents failed to give her the medical care required to treat her illness, “Larissa’s father abandoned the family when she was young. Her mother, who remarried, left Larissa unattended during the critical years when her condition might have been treated.” Neither Larissa nor her aunt was aware of the name of the illness she suffered at the time. 

It takes a steep pathway to get to Larissa’s house through a narrow dirt track that drops downhill. The house has a tin roof and is a red brick structure of a single room where the family of seven sleeps on the floor. During the interview, Larissa’s youngest, a seven-month-old, lay asleep, bundled in blankets. Next to the room is an open area used as a kitchen. 

“I have been blind for as long as I can remember,” Larissa says quietly, her hands folded in her lap.

As a young child, while other children her age sat in classrooms learning their letters, Larissa sat at home. She was the only visually impaired child in the village and eagerly waited for her cousins and siblings to return from school so she could listen to their stories.

Larissa has never touched a Braille book, whether in English, Khasi-the dominant language in Meghalaya- or Pnar, the language used predominantly in Jaintia Hills. 

In Meghalaya, Braille exists in Khasi and Garo, the region’s major languages, but, for Pnar speakers, including Larissa, there is no Braille script. 

While speaking with EastMojo, there were moments when Larissa smiled and moments when she went silent. She smiled when the topic was her five children. But whenever the conversation turned to education, she fell silent. 

As she spoke, Larissa rubbed her eyes repeatedly. Her children clung to her arms, pressing against her sides as if seeking comfort. Her eyes she said, had a dull, constant ache every day. 

“I have never had dreams or ambitions,” Larissa said, her voice steady but tinged with sadness. “I have never dreamt about going to school or having a job.  As a blind person, dreaming was not a possibility for me.”

“If I had the chance to study, I would want to study now,” she said eagerly while slightly leaning forward. “I would want to start from the beginning. From A, B, C. I would want to learn everything.”

Over the last two months, EastMojo travelled to the West Jaintia Hills district in Meghalaya, commonly referred to as Jaintia Hills, and to Chawngte in Mizoram’s Lawngtlai district, meeting people who could not complete their education because they were blind or visually impaired. 

While the educational levels of people with disabilities often suffer because of a lack of accessibility and sensitised education systems, what was surprising was that several families in the places EastMojo visited had never even heard of Braille, a script that could have helped their loved ones continue as students and discover a world outside their homes.

An Unknown Concept, Even for Teachers

In Jaintia Hills, for many, even the educated, Braille is a concept that is still new. Chanmiki War, an assistant professor of Political Science who teaches at Northeast Adventist University, one of the biggest Universities in the Jaintia Hills, told EastMojo he heard about the Braille script for the first time during election duty in 2023. “They gave us Braille-enabled ballot papers for blind voters. Before that, I did not know Braille existed,” he said.

Chanmiki’s cousin, Heibormi Perkyntein, 27, has had issues with his eyesight since birth. He went completely blind when he was in class two. 

While his siblings and cousins, including Chanmiki, went on to pursue higher education, his family was not aware of any educational opportunities for the visually impaired. As a result, Heibormi has spent his whole life helping with household chores. 

“There are no blind children from my village who go to school,” Chanmiki said. He was referring to the village of Wahiajer. Beyond the unavailability of Braille material, there is also the reality of village life where agriculture is the main livelihood, and parents are in the fields until dusk. “Dropping off and picking up their child is not a privilege most families have. There is also a lack of awareness from the government’s side, and an overall lack of support for the visually impaired,” he said.

The Only School for the Blind, Still Waiting on Braille

Around 24 kilometres from Larissa’s house, and just a 30-minute drive from Heibormi’s village, is Meghalaya’s only dedicated school-cum-boarding facility for the blind, the School of Mother Elizabeth for Visually Impaired Children in Nongbah. 

The institution was founded in 2013. By then, Larissa and Heibormi were above the permitted admission age. But while they might have missed the opportunity, 59 other children like them, from rural pockets of Meghalaya, now have a chance at education. But even their journey faces a big stumbling block. 

For the school, Braille not being available in Pnar, the majority language of the area, is not seen as a challenge, because they have not been able to access Braille textbooks even in the languages where Braille is available, which are Khasi, English and Garo. 

EastMojo spoke to some of the students in the school, several of whom expressed a desire to learn Braille in Pnar. One student from class six, Ram Langbang Shangpung, said, “I speak Pnar, but I can also understand Khasi because some words are similar. But I wish some of our studies were taught in Pnar, I would understand it better.”

The school is run by the Jyothi Seva Society, a Catholic organisation working for the education, rehabilitation, and empowerment of blind and visually impaired people in India. 

The society first established a vocational training centre for the visually impaired in Kotagiri, Tamil Nadu, in 1992, followed by a primary school for blind children in Bengaluru in 1996. Jyothi Seva later expanded to the Northeast, establishing the School of Mother Elizabeth for Visually Impaired Children in Meghalaya in 2013.

The school, which runs from nursery to class 8, was started with six children in August 2013. The students are a mix of children who are 50 or 60 per cent blind, with only a few being totally blind. 

Victoria Suiam, a teacher, recalled that when the school first started, people in the area had a hard time understanding how it would function. “We had to work hard to convince parents to send their children,” she said. Families who had initially been against it eventually sent their children once they understood the school’s purpose,” she explained. 

The school consists of two buildings. The first building has the classrooms, and as soon as you enter, to the left is a room with lace curtains and green tabletops. When EastMojo visited the school, eight children were sitting in brown-and-white striped uniforms in this room, happily chatting away while waiting for their teacher. In another room, children were practising typing on a keyboard while listening to words through a connected phone. Another room, a classroom for the littlest ones filled with red chairs and low tables, was empty except for schoolbags. Outside, the small children were playing, running across a green field with their teacher. 

While all the rooms seemed filled with promises of education and a future for the children scurrying about the halls, the saddest room in the building was the library. The library had stacks of books donated from as far away as Bangalore, London, and Shillong. However, the most fundamental need of the children was missing – textbooks in Braille. The teachers informed EastMojo that requests had been made repeatedly to the Meghalaya Board of School Education (MBSE), but there has been no response so far. 

EastMojo reached out to the Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities to inquire about the status of the request for Braille textbooks. However, no response was received at the time of publication. 

A Different State, the Same Gap

Nearly 1,200 km from Jaintia Hills district headquarters – Jowai, near the Indo-Bangladesh border, a similar fate awaits people in the village of Kamalanagar, also known as Chawngte C, headquarters of the Chakma Autonomous District Council (CADC) and home to Mizoram’s Chakma community, the state’s second-largest ethnic group after the Mizo. 

Nationwide, the Chakma are one of India’s larger tribal communities, numbering 228,281 people according to the 2011 census. 

They are spread across Mizoram, Tripura, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, West Bengal, Meghalaya, and Nagaland, with the largest concentrations in Mizoram, Tripura, and Arunachal Pradesh. Roughly 230,000 people in India speak the Chakma language natively. Chakma is used as the medium of instruction in schools within the council’s jurisdiction, in place of Mizo, the state’s official language. 

That policy is part of what leaves young Chakma effectively locked out of Mizoram’s job market, which requires proficiency in Mizo for most government positions.

Education, healthcare, and other basic amenities are scarce here. Reporting by EastMojo found the CADC’s literacy rate at 46.4 per cent, against a state average of 98.2 per cent. 

People with disabilities are at a still greater disadvantage in this corner of the state. An activist from the CADC and Founder, Chakma Development Foundation of India, Suhas Chakma, told EastMojo that Chakma students are unable to access education because of the language, as most of them do not know Mizo, the state language, and also due to their remote geographical location. 

A Degree Interrupted by a Screen

In Kamalanagar, international flights bound for Myanmar often pass overhead, and it was while watching one such flight go by that eight-year-old Hogon Chakma’s eye, already swollen with infection, ruptured.

“He was watching a plane fly by with his swollen eye, and it burst,” his mother recalled, “He didn’t go to school for a year, and the next year was difficult too. People started teasing him, calling him names like ‘battery eye,’ and he became very reserved and shy.”

Hogon passed his Class Twelve exams in 2017, but with much difficulty. His eyes would often fill with pus. His sight, his family believes, could have been saved if they had money. 

Hogon went on to pursue a degree at Government Kamalanagar College. He made it to his second year before dropping out during the pandemic due to the need to attend online classes. “I had to borrow my friends’ phones to take exams, and studying from screens used to hurt my eyes,” said Hogon. 

Hogan now spends his days collecting sand from a quarry on the Tuichawng River. He has to dive into the water for it, which often irritates his eyes.

When asked if he would have completed his education if he had access to Braille, Hogon had a puzzled look on his face. Once the translator explained what Braille was, he responded, “I have never heard of Braille.”

Suhas Chakma, the CADC-based activist, explained the issue, “Braille is mostly unknown and unaffordable for the overwhelming majority of the Chakmas. The state, including the Chakma Autonomous District Council, has not taken cognisance of such needs for visually impaired children.”

Hogon still hears the planes go by. But now, most mornings when the planes fly through, he is already waist-deep in the Tuichawng river, bag in hand, his one working eye stinging against the current. 

He sometimes watches the schoolchildren pass by and pictures himself in a shirt and pants, teaching the students in the classrooms. But until this interview, the twenty-seven-year-old had never heard that there is a script that he could study without hurting his eyes. 

In Chawngte, the question of a Chakma script in Braille has not been raised yet. As in Jaintia Hills, word of Braille’s invention has yet to reach people here.

This story was supported by the International Foundation for Disability Inclusion’s (IFDI) Journalism Fellowship on Disability Inclusion.