the vision for indian interpreting!

It sometimes hard for me to grasp that the numbers are so low. And yet the numbers should be so high. given that there are lets say 10 million deaf people in india. lets remove half as being overstated. so 5 million then lets remove 80% as being rural and therefore limited language skills and mostly home sign users. thats 1 million and lets remove 80% as being semi lingual and orally trained and so are unable to speak or to sign. that leaves us 200,000 urban signers. Lets say half of these have not been able to influence any one in their family to sign though they sign themselves. then we have 100,000 deaf people who sign and have siblings who sign. That makes it 100,000 siblings who sign. and taking the last number of 200,000 signers assuming that these many deaf signers get married and have children who sign then we are talking about another 100,000 at least of CODAs. so we should have about 200,000 sign users in the country somewhere.

CAN YOU IMAGINE THAT??? 200,000 INTERPRETERS!!!!

That is what my target for ASLI is. 200,000 members. The number of Indian sign language interpreters whether they are active or not or whether they are formally trained or not, whether they are interested in signing as a profession or not..... they are out there.

All ASLI needs to do is get out there and find them. Just locate them and we are going to be up to our eyebrows in Interpreters and not a moment too soon. There is a whole army of deaf people waiting for services and resources and information and everything.

Can you imagine when we tell the govt they need to have one interpreter per school cuz Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan, "education for all" cannot function otherwise? Thats 12 lakh Govt schools and about 50 lakh private schools. You are talking some serious numbers at only one per school. if it was two? or three? Its the highest growing profession in the country.

there is a lot to do. that is for sure.