NEW FACILITY: Anbumani Ramdoss, Union Minister for Health and Family Welfare, inaugurating the new administrative building of the All-India Institute of Speech and Hearing in Mysore on Monday. Minister for Health and Family Welfare N. Cheluvarayaswam y is seen.

MYSORE: The Union Government will constitute a task force to launch a national programme on prevention of speech and hearing disability on the lines of an initiative for preventing blindness, Anbumani Ramdoss, Union Minister for Health and Family Welfare, said on Monday.

Inaugurating the new administrative building of the All-India Institute of Speech and Hearing (AIISH) here, he said the thrust of the new programme will be on early detection of speech and hearing disability among children. The Government is expected to approve the programme, he added.

Dr. Ramdoss said the programme will be launched in 34 centres initially — one each in 25 States and nine Union Territories. The objective is to provide services pertaining to prevention, early identification, and intervention, and the AIISH will be the nodal agency, he said.

A pilot programme will be launched by the AIISH in Mysore and Mandya districts in Karnataka, Vellore and Villupuram districts in Tamil Nadu, and Malappuram in Kerala, the Minister said and added that the national programme should have been launched 20 years ago given the gravity of the problem.

He said 10 per cent to 13 per cent of schoolchildren in the country have speech defects, including difficulty in articulation, stuttering, middle-ear disorders, which lead to learning disability.

Dr. Ramdoss quoted from data collected by the National Sample Survey Organisation and said that among every one lakh people in the country, there are 291 persons with hearing loss and 207 persons with speech defects.

Dr. Ramdoss promised to approve the AIISH's proposal to establish a regional centre in the north-east. He said a regional centre will be established in Guwahati this year.

Thirty-four per cent of clinical cases at the AIISH pertain to persons from outside the State and there is a need to establish regional centres, he said.

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