Guwahati: Seven-year-old Sivanya Kaushik from Dibrugarh district's Duliajan was unable to speak or respond to signals until she was five. She couldn't call her mother "Maa" or her father "Deuta", which deeply saddened her parents. They had lost hope of hearing her voice.
However, two years later, Sivanya not only calls her parents but also fluently pronounces Assamese and English alphabets and words, communicating effectively with everyone.
Similar to Sivanya, the lives of around 200 hearing-impaired children and their families have positively transformed over the last two decades, thanks to the intervention of the Guwahati-based non-govt organisation "Saraswati Bagdhwani Training Centre". Here, students receive specialised speech therapy to help them speak. The centre also runs a school, "Saraswati Bagdhwani Jatiya Bidyalaya", where children receive formal education along with speech training. The school has achieved a 100% pass rate in Class X board examinations since its inception.
Sivanya's mother, Rimjhim Baruah Borthakur, shed happy tears remembering the first time Sivanya called her "Maa". She credits this improvement to Saraswati Bagdhwani and its founder, Munindra Nath Kalita, for their child's development. "When she was around nine months old, she tried to make sounds and was responsive to signals. During that time, she was diagnosed with gallbladder stones, and the medications used might have affected her hearing ability, causing her to stop responding to sounds. She remained like that until she was five. On a relative's recommendation, we enrolled her at the school, and our lives took a hopeful turn since then," Rimjhim told TOI.
Munindra Nath Kalita, the founder and principal of Saraswati Bagdhwani, developed an innovative speech therapy technique after five years of research, enabling hearing-impaired people to speak. After completing his master's in linguistics from Gauhati University in 1993, Munindra was tasked with tutoring a hearing-impaired student in Guwahati. Initially, he struggled to impart knowledge due to the student's hearing limitations, but he took it as a challenge to devise a technique to enable the student to speak.
"During my master's, I learned that to speak, one does not need hearing ability, only vocal organs. Based on that knowledge, I conducted extensive research on phonetics and developed signs for 27 letters — six vowels and 21 consonants — of the Assamese language. I showed the student how to open his lips to make the sounds of the alphabets, and I succeeded in helping him pronounce the alphabets. This innovation includes the signs of the letters, the feeling and vibration of the sounds felt at various places while pronouncing a letter, and a scientific education process. Our senior students can even sing and recite, who once couldn't speak a word," Kalita said.
Kalita claims this is the only technique that enables hearing-impaired individuals to speak, unlike other existing techniques that use only sign languages. He emphasises spreading the technique through govt initiatives across the state to benefit as many people with hearing disabilities as possible.
In 2000, the school started with only four students in a rented accommodation under the Anandaram Baruah flyover at Chandmari. It has since produced over 200 alumni who lead normal lives in society. The institute provides free education for students living below the poverty line and offers special fee concessions for students from lower-middle-class families.