Interpreter Recounts Signing Beside President, Flags Shortage of Trained Hands
Sign language interpreter K.V.L. Suchitra Balakrishna recalls interpreting for President Droupadi Murmu and highlights India's acute shortage of trained interpreters.
When President Droupadi Murmu addressed the first convocation of the Central Tribal University of Andhra Pradesh in Visakhapatnam in June, K.V.L. Suchitra Balakrishna stood on the dais beside her, converting the Hindi speech into sign language as it was delivered. The Governor, the State Education Minister and the Union Education Minister were present in the audience.
Recalling the occasion, Ms. Suchitra said she was able to render the address within a fraction of a second of it being spoken. She signs fluently in five languages — Telugu, Hindi, English, Odia and Bengali — and believes that range is why officials selected her for the task.
The assignment marked the culmination of a life spent around sign language. Her elder sister, Padmaja, is hearing impaired, and both attended the same special school in the 1990s. In 1996, choreographing the song 'Hum Honge Kamyaab' in sign language for her deaf classmates convinced her that schools should not separate children by disability. "This education gave me my livelihood," she said. "Today, it placed me beside the President of India."
That personal history has fed into advocacy work now focused on this year's International Day of Sign Languages, observed on September 23 under the theme "Declaring Deaf People's Human Rights". The occasion also marks the 75th anniversary of the World Federation of the Deaf and 20 years since the UN adopted the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
Against that backdrop, Ms. Suchitra said India's shortage of trained interpreters remains severe. Visakhapatnam has only two or three, Andhra Pradesh fewer than ten, and the Indian Sign Language Research and Training Centre has put the all-India figure at under 300.
Much of her outreach, she said, has gone into corporate awareness sessions, including for Biocon's two Visakhapatnam units, and sign-language training in government schools across Parawada for students in Classes VIII to X — an effort she said now covers every school there. She also leads an annual session at NTPC's summer camp for adolescent girls, hoping repeated exposure will normalise the language beyond the deaf community.
The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016, recognises sign language as a means of communication for the hearing impaired. Ms. Suchitra argues that its provisions, including interpreter positions in government schools, colleges and departments, remain largely unimplemented nine years on. She has been seeking land in Visakhapatnam to expand her training work, a request she said has gone unanswered for close to two decades.
"Give us respect," she said, speaking of persons with disabilities more broadly. "Not charity. That is all we are asking, for every child."