Karnataka’s Braille printing press out of order, students suffer

Now, to add to the woes, the only Braille printing press in the state has gone out of order. It has been sent to Norway for repairs and the state is finding it hard to cope with the demand for Braille textbooks.

The state Braille printing press was set up at Mysore in 1982. With the number of visually-challenged students growing, the old press failed to meet the demands for more textbooks and the government, in 2005, imported a Braillo 400 SR machine from Norway. The machine can print 2,000 Braille pages per hour and also helps preserve the content in digital format. More than a year ago, the motherboard of the machine had a technical glitch and since then, the printing has stopped.

The machine was purchased with funding under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan at a cost of Rs 70 lakh through a private firm in Lucknow. It had to be sent back to Norway as there are hardly any facilities in the country to repair such press units.

Following this, though the government outsourced printing of textbooks to the National Institute of Visually Challenged, the demand is such that there has been an acute scarcity of textbooks.

There are four government-run residential schools for the visually-challenged in Karnataka, besides 23 aided schools run by private parties, with more than 10,000 students under different disciplines.