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Founder - Anukrama Foundation
Sign Language Expert
On International Day of Sign Languages, we speak to Geeta Bhatia, founder of Anukrama Foundation – an initiative for the hearing impaired to help them participate at par with the society and the world.
Geeta has been working with the deaf community for as long as she remembers. To be able to communicate with her hearing-impaired sibling, Geeta was able to communicate with her through sign language and this attachment further developed into an interest when Geeta found out that, at the time, there were only 250 Sign Language Interpreters in India.
These stats worried Geeta for the deaf community and having watched her sister, she took it upon herself to build something bigger in the means of communication so that everyone deserves a fair chance at life.
Geeta was 16 when she volunteered with DeafWay Association, an NGO & when she was in college, she got an opportunity to learn Sign Language at the Association of Sign Language Interpretation where she was encouraged to become a professional interpreter. Geeta did her MBA & studied marketing at IIM. She worked with many firms as a marketing consultant but her ambition was to curtail the differences between the hearing impaired and the hearing community.
In 2015, Geeta & her sister founded Anukrama Foundation - a social enterprise for the deaf & underprivileged whose major objective includes engaging these special individuals into mainstream employment & educating the youth of India to learn the beautiful, Indian Sign Language & spread awareness.
Anukrama’s many efforts include pushing the Indian Government to legally recognize Indian Sign Language as a part of Indian Languages so it can be a medium of teaching & learning in educational institutions. This in turn, can help millions of people receive education & employment which is their right as any other citizen in our multilingual and diverse country.
Geeta’s efforts to actively support the special community has materialized through job opportunities, education, providing basic amenities to the underprivileged children, families; all that started with compassion and communication.
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