Investing faith in the differently-abled

Pune, Maharashtra: Being an orphan is difficult enough. But Rajendra Jadhav’s woes did not end there. Before he could finish his education, his elder brother asked him to find himself a job and a place to stay. Rajendra would have managed had it not been for the fact that he was born mentally challenged. Then he found a guardian angel in the form of Subhash Chuttar, founder and managing partner at the Pune-based Sharayu Precision, a company that manufactures auto spare parts for companies like Tata Motors and others. File photo: Subhash Chuttar can be seen with former President APJ Abdul Kalam Absorbed as an employee, Rajendra was given basic training in assembly functions, a repetitive process that requires a lot of concentration. Now, he has moved on to independent delivery of finished products. “I want to learn new things. I have got my own house and I can ride a cycle,” he asserts with a sense of pride and self-confidence. At Sharayu Precision, Chuttar employs over 50 mentally and physically challenged men and women who work at jobs ranging from riveting, drilling and greasing to polishing and packing. For his unique contribution to providing opportunities for the disabled, Chuttar has been honoured with the Hellen Keller Award instituted by the National Centre for Promotion of Employment for Disabled People as also the Suryadatta Award. In fact, when Chuttar looks for new workers to handle the assembly, chipping and cutting operations on the shop floor as and how the demand for his products and services increases, the first place he visits is not a recruitment agency but a school for the mentally challenged. “The normal assumption everyone makes is that mentally or physically challenged people are incapable of any work. They are often seen as a burden on society. The truth is that they can be more productive than normal healthy people because their level of concentration is always very high and their minds are never cluttered with abstractions,” Chuttar says. In the assembly line What may have initiated Chuttar to dare the unknown is his own background. Without even a college degree, he began work as a helper on a production floor before graduating to being a foreman. The experience thus gained led him to set up his own business in 1975. Chuttar now has two companies and the group turnover per annum is Rs 15-crore. He is helped in his business by his son Ajay who is mentally challenged but has been trained to handle the companies’ excise documentation procedures. Retracing the journey of so many years, Ujjwala Joshi, who works as an administrator but is both, a mother and sister to this group of “special workers with unflagging determination to fight the odds and stand on their own feet,” recalls Suryakant Yadav as the first mentally disabled employee who was trained to handle assembly jobs. “It was after watching him work with a higher productivity level than normal workers that I found the courage to employ more such people. I have now made a conscious decision to have at least 25% of employees from the disabled category as part of my workforce,” Chuttar states. This includes a fair proportion of women too. However, it’s an uphill task all the way. As supervisor Robert Joseph explains, “a lot of patience is initially required to get them to perfect the process. Later, they can be relied on to do it a certain way without errors or wastage of raw material. But what is also important is to understand their personal needs and frustrations.” There are new experiences with every disabled employee. Ujjwala recounts one incident: “One of our disabled employees, Yashwant Gorse, once started sulking after his salary was paid and he stopped coming to work. One of our supervisors then went to his house to enquire about what had happened. It transpired that I had paid him his salary in denomination of Rs 500 and since the packet had looked slimmer than what he was used to, he thought I had paid him less. We had to convince him that the amount was the same although the notes were less.” What has helped this experiment become a success story is that Chuttar looks upon every employee as a family member. Birthdays, marriages, housewarming ceremonies, festivals – all these are occasions for the employees to visit each other’s homes and this leads to better camaraderie, understanding and trust. “We also help them save a portion of their salary to make investments that can help them in the future,” Chuttar informs. Having done all this and more, Chuttar still has one more wish to fulfill. “I want to build a special training centre for the challenged so that they can easily find jobs and live useful lives,” he confides. Given the fact that Chuttar does not find any meaning in the word impossible, even this dream will surely come true.

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