This Horticulture Training Centre in Bengaluru serves as a lifeline to many diffabled youngsters. Here's how

N Ganesh is a 28-year-old polio victim who hails from a small village in Davanagere. After he worked his way through his class X exams, there was no one to fund his education. One of the rehabilitation workers in his village told him about a horticultural training programme specially meant for disabled people. That's when he decided to take the leap and try to get a job for himself. In 2017, he joined The Association of People With Disability's Horticultural Training Centre in Bengaluru. Within a span of four months, Ganesh had acquired some nifty skills and was out hunting for a job. Today, he works as a gardening supervisor at a private real estate firm and is thrilled at contributing to his family's upkeep.

 

Like Ganesh, there are many success stories where were sown and nurtured at the APD's Horticultural Training Center. Started in 1959 by the late N S Hema and a group of differently-abled people, this non-governmental organisation aims to bring inclusivity in society. Over the years, they have trained over 2,500 youngsters in horticultural skills. 

 

The impact, according to Basavaraja N Samshi, who has been working as a Senior Programme Manager in the Horticultural Training Center for 35 years, has been immense. He says, "Many youngsters with disability in India assume that they are incapable of doing any work. Here, we not only tell them that it is possible but show that no disability can stop a man from doing what they want to. Thus, we change their perception and give them a lot of self-confidence. We train everyone including the polio-afflicted, people with cerebral palsy, mental health issues, partial visual impairment and those who are mute and deaf."

 

Self learning: Trainees work their hands in the garden at APD Center (Pic: Sriram B N)

With a spurt in horticulture's popularity, many youngsters come from remote areas, especially from the North Karnataka region, to get trained here. But there is a rather stringent selection process that they follow. Basavaraja says, "We work with different stakeholders including NGOs, anganwadi workers and village rehabilitation workers. Every year we go to rural areas in Karnataka and ask them to provide details of diffabled people who are aged 18-35 years. With the data about their educational backgrounds and interests, we segregate them into groups and only then do we bring them to our training centre." 

 

Once they are in, the training gets serious. But it happens in an organic manner, "The training does not start immediately for the students. A month is spent in helping them converse with each other, asking them to open up themselves, being tidy etc. Even during this stage, we give them a chance to tell us what courses they would like to pursue other than horticultural training. In such cases, we shift them to other livelihood courses like hospitality, BPOs, office management and technical courses including fitter and electronic mechanic. The remaining three months goes in training them in these specific courses."

 

Practical classes: C B Suresh is  polio-afflicted  and has been working as a trainer in APD for over two decades now

Training personnel at APD have categorised the Horticultural Training course into two types. While the first one is meant to train in Garden Supervising, the second one is to create Garden Specialists. Not all the candidates are trained in both the courses. They are segregated based on their respective educational qualifications. While youngsters who have passed Class X can pursue either the Garden Supervisor course or Garden Specialist course based on their preference, people who are illiterate or have not passed Class X can only pursue the Garden Specialist course. A Garden Supervisor's work is to plan the landscaping for home or office gardens. Meanwhile, a Garden Specialist is taught to monitor the health of plants, learn different methods of planting and repotting, etc. Currently, 53 people are pursuing this training in Bengaluru.


Benefits of developing ‘green skills’

 Explaining the benefits of undertaking training in this field, Basavaraja says, "The training for this particular programme is undertaken in lush greenery, so it is a treat for anyone's eyes. People will enjoy learning here. Apart from this, horticultural activities will help the trainees develop better eye-hand coordination."

So what do they learn?
The trainees are taught to grow everything from flowers to vegetables and ornamental plants. They are taught leaf cutting, plant transplantation, de-weeding, watering, preparing organic compost, common and pruning, and even the scientific names of plants. "Since we deal with people having all kinds of physical disabilities, including mute and deaf students, we have specialised faculty who can teach them the names of plants and vegetables in sign language. It takes time for the students to learn because they would not have learnt the common sign language in rural areas.  Another thing is, everyone is not physically strong to undertake all gardening activities, even if they may want to. In such cases, we make sure that two people work together on one activity, to make it less daunting. We also grow all kinds of native flowers like rose, jasmine, chrysanthemums, ornamental flowers, vegetables like chilli, tomato, greens and much more. We have even created a special greenhouse to grow orchids – our students find this particular plant very interesting," says Basavaraja who wants to involve disable women also in this programme in a few years. Currently, the programme is meant only for men.

 

The Orchids: The APD Center has a seperate green house for Orchid flowers which was donated by a corporate company under CSR activity

Teaching youngsters to be self-reliant 
Basavaraja and the group of people in APD not only believe in making youngsters job-ready, but they teach them to be self-reliant as well. "We teach students to cook for themselves, clean their laundry and also make their bed. Once they get a job, they will shift to new places and we believe that they should be independent and not depend on anyone," he says. 

APD in the beginning
Initially, the Horticultural Training Centre was started in a one-acre piece of land in the garden city's Jeevan Bhima Nagar. The first batch of students also graduated from this centre in 1988. It included a huge garden, rooms for accommodation and the APD office. Now, it is a full-fledged horticultural centre where students implement their skills practically, grow plants and sell them to the public. Basavaraja explains, "As and when the course became popular, a large number of people started coming in, wanting to join us. This centre at Jeevan Bhima Nagar became too small to accommodate people. It led us to start a new training centre in Kylasanahalli. The journey was not easy for us. We requested the Government of Karnataka to allocate five acres of land several times and finally got it allotted in 2003. Meanwhile, we raised funds and some people donated money for the construction of the building. In 2004, the construction of the new centre was completed and it was inaugurated in 2006. Keeping sustainability in mind, we have even introduced solar panels, a rainwater harvesting system and we are in the process of installing a water treatment plant very soon."

 

Eco-friendly: For the first time, the trainees at APD have tried their hands on the plantable seed clay Ganesha which will be kept for sale

Every year, APD's horticultural training centre conducts annual fairs, which draws a large crowd. The public can visit and buy a variety of plants, manure and everything that is required for setting up a garden. Basavaraja adds that there is a huge public demand for the plants. But most of the times, the products outnumber the demands. Hence they have come up with a few plans to train more disabled people in their Horticultural Training Centre in the future. In the coming years, they plan to train over 10,000 people in Karnataka.

What about the jobs?
With Bengaluru being the garden city and other metro cities including Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai also adopting terrace gardening and other contemporary methods, there are ample job opportunities available for the trainees. But APD team wants to create the same number of opportunities even in the Tier II and III cities for their students. Basavaraja says, "There are many people who were trained at APD and worked in corporate companies. They earned and saved enough money to buy a piece of land and develop it into a farm. Some have even created nurseries, thereby generating jobs for people just like them," he concludes.

Some of the important events in the history of APD

N S Hema, a visionary founder of Association of People with Disability who was wheelchair-bound put forth her idea at the age of 17 to start an organisation for many people like her and dreamt of an equal world 

Initially, the group was registered with a name called Association of the Physically Handicapped (APH) under the Mysore Societies Registration Act on May 20, 1959 

While the organisation was initially started in a small room in Bengaluru's Malleshwaram, it was shifted to Lingarajapuramin 1960 when V T Padmanabhan, an eminent industrialist gifted 2 acres of land to the founder. Currently APD has its centres in Vijayapura , Davanagere, Kolar and Bengaluru Urban

APD has established its presence in Gadag, Koppal, Haveri, Davanagere, Bagalkot, Belgaum, Chitradurga, Ramanagara, Chamarajanagar and Dakshina Kannada via partners