Running to Spread Awareness About Learning Disabilities

Learning Disability is a condition that causes a severe difficulty, for people afflicted with it, in learning basic skills like reading and writing. Such people acquire information at a rate lower than what is considered normal for other people at their age. These people, as a result, may also have some difficulty in speaking and listening. The disorder lasts the person's lifetime.

Providers of learning solutions have to come up with alternative non-traditional teaching methods to teach people with learning disabilities.

Tata Interactive Systems (TIS), where I work, has developed many international award-winning solutions that help screen and identify children with learning disabilities and then help them learn. You will find a detailed overview of TIS’s involvement and solutions for learning disabilities here.

TIS is also involved in a big way in interventions in learning disabilities in India.

In India, TIS mentors the Learning Disability Center at Sion Hospital—the only center in the State of Maharashtra, approved by the State Government to certify students with learning disabilities. Beyond the salaries and the stationery, we help the clinic with a hands-on approach—whether it’s by streamlining the day-to-day functioning or finding solutions to the scores of issues that crop up from time to time. We also share our reservoir of educational software, including the award-winning Jojo in Numberland, to help the children discover the joys of learning.

Today, on January 15, over 50 TISians are participating in the Standard Chartered Mumbai Marathon 2006 to show TIS' commitment towards helping those with Learning Disabilities.

I wish all my colleagues running the marathon the very best.

If any of you are running the marathon, or simply cheering the participants, look out for people sporting black T-shirts with the picture that accompanies this post. They are running to spread awareness about Learning Disabilities.