(GIST OF YOJANA) Empowering Divyang Storytellers

GIST OF YOJANA : Empowering Divyang Storytellers

NOVEMBER-2025

Empowering Divyang Storytellers

Context:

A group of Divyang participants with varied disabilities had come together for a course of ten days to learn the art of film making using their mobile phones. They included individuals with locomotor challenges, participants with low vision, those with cerebral palsy, and those with hearing or speech impairments. Driven by a desire to learn and explore newer dimensions that lay within themselves.

Program highlights:

The workshop aimed to open up storytelling through simple tools, patient mentorship, and a deeply inclusive environment that took into consideration individual conditionalities and concerns of the Divyang participants.
Accessibility was central. The sessions were supported by Indian Sign Language (ISL) interpreters who communicated in sign language in real-time speaking and demonstrating to the hearing impaired participants.
Care was taken to make sure that communication and understanding were being effected. The pace of the workshop varied, with an ebb and flow centred around communication, understanding, and application. Careful monitoring and repetition helped enhance understanding. Patience, responsiveness, and empathy were a continuing thread throughout.

Key Takeaway

Filmmaking, at its core, is about perspective. When we make storytelling tools accessible, we allow new perspectives to enter the frame—ones that have always been there, on the periphery, waiting for a way in.
And all it took was a smartphone, patience, sensitivity and empathy, encouragement and empowerment to bring out the stories that lay within them.

Evolution

This journey of inclusive filmmaking workshops for Divyang participants was sparked in 2019 by a pioneering idea conceived by the then Director of FTI1, Bhupendra Kainthola.
This novel thought was to have a pioneering workshop on smartphone filmmaking for young participants with Autism and Down Syndrome. This was a challenging assignment, venturing into uncharted territory.
A methodology was devised with Down Syndrome patient was to be a participant. Subsequent to this, a 10-day workshop was conducted at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication in New Delhi.
There was learning on both sides as it proceeded - for me as the educator, as well as for the neurodiverse participants and their accompanying caregivers.

Conclusion:

With the Rights of Persons with Disability Act underlining equal opportunities and inclusivity for the Divyang, it is heartening that FTII, in association with different government and private organisations, has been fostering a climate of inclusion among those with disabilities through these workshops. The Divyang perspective and creativity are being empowered and facilitated to find expression, and that can only lead to a more understanding, appreciative, inclusive, and empathetic society.