At three years of age, pneumonia snatched away Reshmi Mohan’s hearing ability. Since she continued to study in a regular school and did not communicate using sign language, she depended on lip reading in her daily interactions. But these limitations did not stop her from gaining employment in Kerala’s Local Self Government department in 2004 and from rising to the post of Assistant Secretary at the Bharananganam gramapanchayat.
Yet, she had always felt that the government’s training programmes were not suited to the differently abled employees, many of whom had no way of understanding what was being taught or had difficulty accessing the material provided to them.
In an interactive session of differently abled persons with Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan in 2021, she raised this issue, setting in motion a chain of events including the beginning of special training programmes for differently abled employees in the department.
