More than 30 years after graduating from Balavidyalaya, the school for young deaf children and institute for teacher training in Chennai received an unexpected gift from an alumnus, Ramnarayan B Prasad: an offer to design a website for the institute.
The school management could not have been happier. Being a non-profit charitable trust, it had avoided having a website due to cost involved in developing and maintaining one, says Meera Suresh, honorary vice principal, Balavidyalaya.
The website was designed in 2006 by Apex and till date the global company continues to maintain it. How the school offering early intervention programmes for children with hearing impairment got this offer is more interesting.
Ramnarayan Prasad had spent his formative years at the school and had moved on to work in other cities in India and the United States.
Ramnarayan joined Apex India as a data entry operator in 1996 and went on to become a data analyst. The stint took him to the United States, where he had to stabilise one of the business divisions of the company.
“I got noticed by Shashikant Gupta, whom we call Shashi, co-founder of the company. He was impressed with my hard work and came to know about my journey from a school for the deaf to mainstream schooling,” says Ramnarayan in an email interaction.
Impressed with the work done by Balavidyalaya to integrate many children like Ramnarayan, Shashi visited the school. “He met Saraswathi madam and Meera madam and learned a lot about the school. Later, he said he would fund the school’s activities starting with the website and that is how the website was paid for by Apex and still continues to be paid for by the company,” says Ramnarayan, who now works as chief technology officer at HawkB Inc.
