I would like to share a exciting news with you all. We (Pradip Sinha -The Chairman | Sunil Abbas – The General Secretary and Zamir Dhale – The Founder of the SEDB, India) went to attend the 6th General Assembly at World federation Of The Deaf-Blind (WFDB) that hosted the workshop in Nairobi, Kenya from 24th to 29th of October 2022. It was an great opportunity to network with various deafblind leaders across the globe. We were able to share and enrich our rich knowledge and experiences of each one of our journey in empowering deaf-blind across geographic locations. We strongly believe this knowledge is very rich and will help us to achieve many successes. We learned and shared our experiences with each other. We learned a lot from their experiences. We also learned to understand many different laws. It was a very different. We motivated Kenyan who are deaf and deafblind that they are facing problems such as discriminations against law and they were advised to overcome all difficulties and problems in their life.
WFDB and Sense International UK team members have made a 2nd global report on deafblindness, which we discussed elaborately and mutually agreed on the report and it will go to UN for the approval, I do hope that we will show the globe report to Government Of India.
Some of deafblind leaders from Spain, Sweden, Ecuador, Colombia and North America are very strong in advocating. They talked a lot in the discussion groups about the rights to information means deafblind should have the knowledge of different laws and how to build their skills. We discussed about accessible health and technologies in advocacy work. We, the deafblind Indians are luckily to have many deafblind advocates and lawyers in the world. The current president of WFDB is Ms. Sania who is deafblind woman from Croatia has completed PhD. The Vice President is Mr. Samuel. These two people and myself (Zamir) have been elected as Asia Regional Representative of the WFDB board. So the three of the new board members are deafblind. I strongly feel that government of India will be recognise deafblind people and we need to make the government officials understand deafblind people have the rights to ask for better education training, access to technologies and employment. We should have the equal rights like others. Deafblind should have a separate disability as a unique disability.
Have you ever wondered on these questions? What are your rights? What is my rights? What is the importance of advocacy? Advocacy is important because deafblind people wanted to educate people about how to help deafblind in communication, education, training and good job to help them to earn equal salaries, not to depend on anyone for all help. Why does government of India not wanted to recognise as deafblind category and make it mixed up deaf-blindness in disability law with Multiple disabilities. Why can’t deafblind be a separate disability?
We believe that we will do hard work to make government to understand, We got continue to raise voices about our rights and needs till its heard and is answered.
