Sparshdnyan: India’s braille newspaper brings news to thousands

Twice a month, 24,000 blind individuals in India can read the news, rather than just piece together stories from televised descriptions.

Journalist Swagat Thorat launched Sparshdnyan, India's only newspaper for the blind, in 2008. His major obstacle: his own sight.

"I had to understand what it is to be blind. So I started visiting the schools that exclusively catered to their needs. I started learning braille and made an entry into their world," Thorat told OPEN Magazine.

The paper's name means "knowledge by touch."

Initially inspired by Helen Keller, Thorat has since taught braille to about 138 sighted people. He has also produced acclaimed plays featuring blind artists.

Thorat knew that reading was empowering, that words could be more descriptive than television news stories. A team of local journalists volunteer their services to write for the 48-page paper. Thorat also recruits visually-challenged writers to contribute to Sparshdnyan.

"It is simply amazing. They have their own interpretations of colour, size, shapes, and it is an eye opener," he says.

Sparshdnyan is distributed among 400 subscribers in India's western Maharashtra state. Most of these issues are sent to institutes for the blind, where each copy is read by an estimated 60 people, putting the unofficial readership at around 24.000.

The project is costly and Thorat has little money to fund the endeavour. To raise support from his seeing peers, he develops documentary films about India's wildlife.

"Many sighted people want to get involved in Sparshdnyan. It is heartening to know that my work has helped change the perspective of the sighted towards the visually challenged," he says.

With India's visually impaired population set to reach 10 million, Thorat hopes to eventually expand his paper into a daily within a year.

"It's important that this newspaper be published," Suchita Shaha, a Mumbai psychologist who has raised money to help cover Thorat's expenses, tells the Toronto Star. "It's not like it is in the West. There are no facilities here in India for the blind, no seeing-eye dogs. We need to do more to help."

(Photo credit: Abid Katib/Getty)