PROFILE

VISUALLY CHALLENGED GIVING VISION OF LIFE TO DESERVING CITIZENS

(Brief Profile of a personality who leads in service despite loss of both eyes)

He is Mr.T. RASHIKESAVAN- Born to   R.Thirupathi ( Father )  T.Koothammal  (Mother) on 05.05.1968 at   Poraiyur, Mettur Taluk, Salem District.   

After completing his formal education in the field of Science, he joined a company manufacturing Oxygen at Tuticorin as a Plant Manager.  While on employment during the year 1997 a disaster occurred when he was checking the pressure of Oxygen in his factory, where an oxygen cylinder exploded smashing his eyes, whereby he lost his vision completely at the Age of 29.

The terrible loss of both eyes shattered his future hopes and dreams.  This did not deter him, but boosted his body and mind to serve the man- kind, especially for those who are physically, visually and mentally challenged.  He quit the company in the year 1997 and started his service projects from his native village .   Mrs . MAHESWARI, who was also working in the same company came forward to become  life partner of Mr.RASHIKESAVAN after the disaster, despite stiff resistance and threats  from her parents and relatives .  The couple converted every difficulty as their stepping stone towards their goal of service to the poor and downtrodden of the society.  They are blessed with a daughter Keerthana and son kishore varman             

 They chose their Native village Poraiyur as Centre of their service activities.  Poriayur is most economically backward village in Mettur Taluk of Salem District.  To begin with Mr. RASHIKESAVAN started  a tailoring unit and gave tailoring  training to village women at Poraiyur.  Since both are educated, they also simultaneously started coaching classes to Children belonging to rich families of Mettur Taluk, to maintain their livelihood.   Slowly they started free coaching classes to poor and downtrodden children at the neighboring villages. At present there are four free coaching centres at the neighbouring villages

1.       Salem camp – 25 students

2.       Mecheri   - 52 students

3. Koolaiyur  - 25 students

4.Kunjandiyur – 50 students

Encouraged by positive response to his service projects, he started a Public Charitable Trust during 2006   with his wife Mrs. Maheswari and Mr

Now under the name of the Trust following service activities are being conducted:

#Free eye camp from the year 2006-2009

#Free Computer Coaching classes for students

# spoken English classes for rural students

# Tailoring Training Classes for Women

# Blood Donation Awareness Campaign

# Free Distribution of Uniforms to 60 School Children (Orphans) during 2008

# Fiancial aid to Mr. Venkatachalam for his heart operation Rs.1,20,000 during 2008( through hundi collection)

# Sponsor of Telephone Coin Box to Physically challenged youth Mr. Ramesh during the year 2009

# Educational Scholarship to eight Physically challenged youth to the tune of Rs.78,794/- during the year 2010.

# From 2006 -2012 Rs.1,50,000 has been financially assisted to 9 village girls to complete their graduation

# In 2012 Rs.36,000 has been financially assisted for 6 school students (those who were unable to continue their matric studies)

#Skill Development workshops for School going children under the guidance of reputed Institution, Chennai. May 2010,2011 & 2012 .

For details www.keerthanatrust.com

The necessary photos, clippings of the above programs are attached herewith.

# A wing of Keerthana Trust is a social organization named as ‘THIRD EYE” aimed to help visually challenged persons through Information Technology and other media . Its Mission statement is “SEEING THROUGH SOUND”.   Soft wares such  as ‘NCan Reader’, ‘Valaya Vedan’ are being developed for visually challenged persons to browse for text files and open them to hear the contents being read by the software.      

Project Wikikalanjiyam:

This project was initiated to provide the advantages of Wikipedia for Visually Challenged people. In third project many students and volunteers worked together to collect wikipedia articles ( Tamil articles), process them and convert them to audio. This allows the Visually challenged people to get the Wikipedia articles in their mobile or any audio player. They can use it anywhere and anytime without internet connection. The files are also available as Text files so that they can use it in A droid mobiles. In 5mb of space they can have more than Tamil articles.   

Softwares developed by Volunteers are:

NCanReader

NCanReader (in Alpha state) is an accessible multilingual Text Reader with Tamil as the default language. It allows the Visually Challenged persons to browse for text files and open them to hear the contents being read. It allows various degrees of navigation.

Features:

It splits long files into pages for easy reading.

Self explaining menus.

Change of Language at any time. For now: Tamil, Hindi and English.

Multiple text encoding support.

Multiple degrees of navigation with navigational keys.

Link: http://www.thirdeyetvg.com/softwares/ThirdEye_TextReader.apk
 

Valaya Vedan(Net hunter)

“Valaya Vedan” is a free PDF to Unicode converter mainly for Visually challenged persons.

Extension: Now you can use Hindi with Valaya Vedan. Supported fonts are Susha, kruti and Shivaji.

Description:

Visually challenged persons can read any Unicode texts using screen reader. The PDF documents contain non standard fonts other than Unicode. The Text To Speech softwares cannot read those contents. Thus to help Visually challenged persons to read the PDF contents by extracting and converting them to Unicode easily.

Default language: Tamil.

Supported fonts: TSCII, Vanavil, Diacritic, Bamini, Shreelipi, Softview, TAB and TAM.

Links: http://sourceforge.net/projects/valayavedan/

http://www.thirdeyetvg.com/softwares/02134/Valaya%20Vedan%20v1.1%20(Beta%20Version)_Portable.exe

Street Hunter with external GPS receiver

 Description:

                Street Hunter allows us to know the current location. It connects with the external GPS receiver and process the received data.

It can work in online and offline mode. In online mode GPRS/Internet connection is needed. Offline mode processes the data received from Open Street Map.

Link:http://sourceforge.net/projects/streethunter/files/      

VISION 2020

#To Establish and run a Technical training institute for Physically handicapped persons and other differently able persons  in two acres of land owned by him .

Awards received:

’Best Social worker’ award given by saelm collector on Republic day function held on 26.01.2010

Award given by Malco Tamil Ilakkiya Mandram for social service on 21.10.2010.

Honoured by Mr.Ponkumar Chief education officer, Erode in teacher day on 05. 09.2011

Award by Agal Sadhanaiyalargal Sangamam on 02.01.2011

CONCLUSION:

Thus visually challenged T. RASHIKESAVAN continues his mission as torch bearer for those who are deprived, poor and downtrodden with unassailable self confidence , marches ahead with commitment and vision with a zeal of enthusiasm in his heart keeping in mind Lord Krishna’s teachings – “ Do your duty –let the results take care of themselves”