Moses Gorrepati – From Disability to Ability: How EnAble India Unlocks Potential

Swami (00:02.69) Hi Moses, lovely connecting with you and great to talk to you on the ContraMines Super CMO show. Thanks for joining in and talking to us.

Moses_EnAble India (00:13.173) Absolutely. Thank you Swami for the opportunity and really looking forward for this conversation.

Q1: Purpose and Mission of EnAble India Swami (00:18.082) Thanks Moses. So Moses, I just wanted to jump into the conversation where I wanted to talk to you about your own journey in EnAble India, but before that, can you talk to me about what EnAble India does and what’s the kind of societal impact and the purpose and mission that the organisation has got today? Moses_EnAble India (00:43.617) Absolutely, so very interesting. It’s very close to my heart, so please keep me timed in case if you need to. At EnAble India, we work for economic independence and dignity of persons with disabilities. Our work impacts across 19 disabilities. That’s ranged from visually impaired, persons with deaf and…you know, persons with physical disabilities and people in the autism spectrum, intellectual disabilities, multiple disabilities like, profound disabilities like, you know, dark blindness and so on and so forth. And our work also impacts across both urban and rural landscapes. In the rural landscape, it’s more on the livelihoods, you know, self-employment, all of that with the open wage employment. We are considered as a thought leaders in the livelihood space. In fact somebody told us you know we are one of the pioneers in opening up jobs for persons with disabilities in the open wage employment. What do we mean by opening up a job? For example, when I was growing up, I always, people told me as a visually impaired, you can be a teacher, school teacher, a lecturer or a music teacher. But today, people with disabilities work across 300 plus job roles, 29 sectors. So the EnAble India has played a very pivotal role in opening up these choices for persons with disabilities. And when we say opening up, what we mean by that is that making the job friendly or can be done by people with disabilities. I will give you an example to just illustrate what is opening up a job. I think in 2004, very early when we started in 1999, and EnAble India founded by Shanti Raghavan and Deepesh Sitaria, both US return. and I’ll tell you their story, why they started, but let me just complete illustration about what is opening up a job. 2004, there’s a petrol car station company that approached us and said, we want to hire persons with disabilities.

He said, well, I mean, why not? Why don’t you look at hiring people with, say, different disabilities, like vision impaired and all that? They said, no, our job involves filling the petrol at a petrol station. So that requires you to see the board, I mean, the distal board and find out where the inlet is and then putting the fuel correctly and all that. So we said, well, yeah, why not? Why don’t we? Persons with hearing impairment, deaf. People said, you know, but how do they communicate? Then we realised when we talked to them, we realised that we don’t talk about national politics or demonetisation or GST or anything, that kind of things at the petrol station. All of that, the conversation is around, you know, what does customer want, whether.

customer want petrol or diesel or gas, how much and how would they like to pay, you know, card cash whatever. So this is the communication. So we said, okay, well, this is the communication. We co-created a solution with the company saying that it is a viable board, which says I am a person with hearing impairment, please indicate your choice. Right. The deaf would go to a customer and say, please indicate your choice. And it’s also in pictures. So that even if the driver is not literate. They can see the picture. OK, I want petrol, diesel, whatever. And I would like to pay cash card. How much? 500. Work is done. So the job, which is otherwise not possible for a deaf to do, is opened up because of this solution. So this is what we call opening up jobs. Right.

And this is what we do at EnAble India. Of course, today, as an organisation, we are focusing on, we are in a mission mode to make sure that livelihood for persons with disabilities is mainstreamed. We work in collectives because we believe that we as an organisation cannot do this work alone and the problem is so huge. So we need all the actors, all the players in the sector to come together. So we run different collectives for different disabilities. For example, there’s a See A Million, which is a mission to transform visually impaired into active citizens and nation builders through digital empowerment. This is for visually impaired. Similarly, we have a hearing for Hear A Million in the space of deaf. We have something coming up, something called Rise A Million in the space of cerebral policy, we have Mission 1000 in the space of intellectual and severe disabilities. So we work in collectives and this is what we do. And as I said, EnAble India started by Shanti and Deepesh because of their own personal journey. When they were in US, both software engineers, when they were in US, they learned Shanti’s brother started growing blind in India. So that time, his name is Hari and he was diagnosed with Retinitis Pigmentosa. That time he was studying in, I think, PCOM. So they, both Shanti and Deepesh, took him to US during the vacation, learned how to enable a person with vision impairment on working on computer mobility and all that. And eventually they came back to India.

And that’s when and they settled in Bangalore because both came back to India with their IT jobs and So that’s you know Bangalore being the IT hub so they came back to Bangalore and said you know how do we use this knowledge that we gained to enable Hari and Why don’t we use this knowledge to enable other brothers and sisters in India? That’s how over a tea table. I mean You know EnAble India was formed in 1999 and what they realised very initially was education is important, rehabilitation is important but one thing that is a game changer is livelihoods because when the first pay check comes to home that is when the shift happens because you suddenly will become part of the conversations in the family, financial decisions and everything so I could see that in my own life and that change before becoming independent and after becoming economically independent. So, both Deepesh and Shanti realised it’s important to focus on livelihoods and that’s how EnAble India was formed. But today, we are building an ecosystem for livelihoods. So we work in the mission, campaign approach, mission approach. We work with different stakeholders in the value chain, but our core focus is on the livelihoods.