Environmental awareness of the visually impaired students: an explorative study

The existence, survival and progress of mankind in this world are largely dependent on the quality of environment as a whole. Today there is environmental crisis in man's life due to over consumption of natural resources. Truly speaking, the problems of varied nature in human life are directly or indirectly related to the environment not because people are unaware or have less knowledge about their environment, but because, people are developing a careless attitude towards their environment. Even ‘educated-elite’ and so called environmentally aware section of people are contributing more in destroying their environment as their needs are more. We live in a world of diversities and individual differences. None of us is identical in true sense either physically or mentally. Those who are fortunate known as gifted, talented and creative, possess superior capacities and potentials in abundance and the unfortunate ones called disabled or impaired are found to suffer from some deficits and deficiencies. Amongst the impaired group, the Visually Impaired (VI) are the most unfortunate in the sense that they cannot see this beautiful environment through their eyes. Therefore, the modest objective of this paper is to explore how much this category of people is aware about their environment. The sample of the study is comprised of 60 VI students studying in class VI to class X in a high school of a metropolitan city of north-east India. The investigator has used self-structured standardized data gathering tools to know the awareness of the VI students towards their environment where they live. To test the hypotheses, appropriate statistical technique has been used. The findings of the study reveal that in spite of being deprived of observing the environment through their eyes, the VI students possess high awareness and clear perception towards the environment.