Students with disabilities scramble for exam writers

As thousands of stu-dents gear up for a re-turn to good old pen and paper in the run-up to the class X and XII Board exams next month, students with special needs find themselves facing a different writers’ bump.

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If seeking a separate, quiet room; frequent breaks; extra time during exams itself was an onerous journey for Mahesh Dhangar — a visually-impaired student of National College — what has thrown him into a deeper end, just before his boards, is finding an amanuensis (a person who writes what another dictates) commonly called a scribe — to write his exams. “Previously, when I was with Happy Home School For The Blind, they helped arrange writers for our Class X exams but in college we are expected to find our own writers,” he says.

Despite technological advances, a General Resolution passed by the Maharashtra government in 2016 to allow students with learning disabilities to use assisting writers and an online repository of scribes set up by the state school education department, a level-playing field is still far-fetched for differently-abled students appearing for boards with the onus to find a scribe on them and their families.