“Higher education has made my life. It has instilled confidence in me. I could imagine my fate, if I were not in college,” said Kusum, 21, a blind girl student of the BA final year at Rajkiya Kanya Mahavidyalaya (RKMV).

Kusum is the daughter of a poor shepherd from an interior Tangnu village in Shimla district. She is one of the many blind girls in the hill state, for whom the phase of darkness is over and they are on their real journey to empowerment.

“I want to become a professor and I will,” said another blind student from RKMV, Muskan, who has taken music as a major subject in college.

Kusum, Muskan and four other blind girls from RKMV have mingled well with normal students in the girls’ college (RKMV) and find it a great learning to live normally.

All thanks to Shimla based social organisation, the Umang Foundation that fought with the system to open the path of inclusive education for poor blind and deaf students at higher levels in 2011.

The students with these disabilities earlier had schooling facility till tenth in the special school for the girls in Sundernagar and for boys at Dhalli in Shimla. After that, there were no schools for them and they were denied education in normal schools. College was a distant dream for them for hitches in the system.

This forced many of them either to drop out and do petty jobs after Class X or go out of state to Chandigarh or Dehradun for higher education, which many couldn’t afford being from poor background.

“When three blind girls, all from the marginalised sections, were denied admission in Government Girls Senior Secondary School, Portmore here in 2011, we wrote a letter to the then Chief Justice of Himachal High Court (HC). Our letter was treated as Public Interest Litigation (PIL) and the school was asked to give admission to the blind girls.

The government was later asked to notify three more normal schools in the state, at Jogindernagar, Kullu and Nahan for inclusive education of blind and deaf boys seeking higher education,” Umang Chairman, Ajai Srivastava told The Statesman.

As it all eased the entry of blind girls in Portmore School, 16 deaf and four blind girls are studying in Class XI and XII in the school at present. The blind and deaf students are now being given admission in the colleges as well as the message on the need for their higher education went across the state. In a first, ten blind girls, who passed out from Portmore School, are studying in ITI (Industrial Training Institute) and are learning computers.

Umang’s concern is that the government has still not followed the court direction to give free education to these disabled students till University level. “They are however getting scholarship as per court directions. Umang also helps many of them with fees and other expenses, along with modern electronic gadgets,” said Umang members.