While Dhruv Lakra buzzes around the office with a frenetic energy, rarely sitting or standing still, the employees of Mirakle Couriers – tucked away in a small office in South Mumbai’s Churchgate district – communicate in sign language. Mirakle employs only persons with a hearing disability.
Lakra, an Echoing Green Fellow, founded the company in 2008 to provide jobs for the hearing-impaired. Since then, it has gotten significant media coverage and has been held up as a success story in the struggle to provide employment for the disabled in India – no small task in a country where 70 million people, or about 7% of a population of 1.2 billion, qualify as disabled.
ABBY CALLARD 