PICTURE SPEAK

ENABLED: Kakkar pats Chaudhry as Rajeshwari Devi (behind them) looks on

A man dressed up like freedom fighter Bhagat Singh operates a mobile telephone booth in Ram Niwas Bagh, one of Jaipur's popular tourist spots. The smile on his face has no traces of a painful past. The man, Bhanwar Lal Chaudhry, 22, had lost both his legs in a train accident five years ago. Despite the setback, Chaudhry, the son of a small farmer of Baniawas village in Pali, completed his matriculation and moved to Jaipur in 2003 to study further.

In the city, he ran across physically challenged people operating telephone sets fitted on hand-driven rickshaws. He found out that these mobile PCOs, worth Rs 60,000 each, had been provided free to the physically disadvantaged by Rainbow, an initiative of Shyam Telelink, a local telecom company. Chaudhry procured one for himself and now earns Rs 200 per day. The Rs 5,000 security deposit that he paid to Shyam Telelink was adjusted in monthly instalments of Rs 500. Now the courageous young man even indulges in his passion for monoacting. The Bhagat Singh look, complete with a moustache, is part of his work uniform.

Rainbow has already provided mobile PCOs to 280 physically challenged persons in at least a dozen cities across Rajasthan. The project was sparked off by a small incident: Saurabh Kakkar, director of Shyam Telelink, and Ajay Khanna, its MD, were driving down a busy Jaipur road when they saw a disabled person trying to cross it. Shyam Telelink had just launched its CDMA services and the two were debating the relative benefits of landline, GSM and CDMA when they saw the struggle of the disabled man. Khanna said, "Limited mobility could benefit someone like this man."

So the company decided to produce mobile PCOs. The idea caught on so much that some disabled people who were unable to contact Shyam Telelink set up their own machines by fitting hand-rickshaws with telephone sets. Rainbow has been especially helpful to women, who make up 30 per cent of its beneficiaries. Rajeshwari Devi, 20, who was disabled after childhood polio, is one such. In the first month, her PCO has earned her about Rs 5,000. "Being self-sufficient and able to meet so many people has given me a purpose in life," she says.

The state Government has been supportive of the venture and the police and municipal authorities also don't harass those operating these PCOs. Shyam Telelink has been inspired by its own initiative: it now employs 70 disabled persons and is working on rickshaws that will have fax and Internet facilities. What began as a spark of kindness has now grown into a glowing fire.

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