Once a busy centre of activity, the campus of the National Association for the Blind (NAB) here in Jeevanbimanagar wears a deserted look.
Since the end of April only around 16 visually impaired persons who had been trained to make cane furniture have been visiting the campus every day and continuing their agitation against the decisions taken by the management.
V. Lakshminarayana, who has been working here for over two decades, says that furniture making is the only skill they have acquired and NAB was helping them to get orders. For each piece of work they do they are paid Rs. 73, and the chairs they make are mainly used in State government offices, including the Vidhana Soudha and Bangalore University. In fact many of their colleagues were fortunate to have been given government jobs, but the others have been left in the lurch. “We are even past the age to apply for other jobs,” Mr. Lakshminarayana said. A visually impaired member of the governing council alleged: “It looks like the new management wants to shut down the NAB and use one-and-a-half-acres of land on the campus for some other purpose.”
Partially funded by the State and Central government, a large portion of funds for the association comes by way of donations.
‘Not closing down’The NAB management describes the anxiety being expressed by the protesters as “a reaction by a few misguided and disgruntled elements to the measures initiated to improve transparency and governance at NAB.”
Alok Kshirsagar, honorary president of NAB, said the transactions in the association will now be cheque based instead of being cash-based.
“We realised there was a huge amount of cash being transacted. Only two or three workers were getting a bulk of orders. So we proposed that cheque-based payments can be made to individual bank accounts. We even said we will continue to pay by cash until they are comfortable,” he explained.
The Department of Women and Child Welfare also intervened and investigated the matter and called the blockage illegal, Srikant Rao, honorary general secretary, said.
He dismissed allegations that the NAB is shutting down. “On the contrary, we have ambitious plans to expand the range of services and scale up in terms of reach. While there has been some disruption in Bangalore, our operations in the rest of Karnataka (Mysore, Hassan and Gundlupet) are continuing. We look forward to resolving these issues peacefully at the earliest,” Mr. Srikant Rao added.
