Rupmani Chhetri, a 37-year-old deaf rights activist and co-founder of SignAble Communications, hails from Darjeeling. Throughout her life, she has often felt lonely and disconnected from those around her due to her disability.

In an interview with Better India, Rupmani shared, "As a child, I believed that I was the only Deaf person in the world. With no awareness of sign language, I experienced discrimination with various labels placed on me because of my Deafness. I was excluded from family activities and conversation and struggled in school, as teachers would speak and I could not hear.”

Rupmani's father, a security guard, did everything he could to have his daughter enrolled in a conventional school because there was not an appropriate Deaf school in Darjeeling at the time. “Efforts to express myself through sign language were met with punishment from teachers who failed to recognize my disability. Since I was a Deaf child, I felt isolated and unheard. My early education was mostly just copying notes without understanding concepts, except for geography, which I found more accessible due to its visual nature,” she said. 

“My extended family was convinced that I would never succeed academically and saw the process of educating me as a futile effort. By the time I was 9 or 10, I had to start working to cover the costs of my school essentials. Making matters worse, I was also forced into speech therapy, as there was no access to sign language available to me,” she added.

Rupmani had unbelievable struggles in her early life, so it's amazing that years later, she co-founded SignAble Communications, a company that, among other things, developed an app that allows the Deaf to express themselves and communicate without barriers.

She shared that the app offers Deaf persons “access to a live interpreter at their fingertips, anytime and anywhere, all at an affordable price." The application facilitates communication between Deaf individuals and critical service providers, such as doctors and police, as well as between them and their family and friends. This is inspirational how she created an app that enables thousands of deaf Indians to access new worlds.

She married her Deaf husband and they went to Delhi after she finished her education up to Class 9. “I initially saw marriage as a way to address my challenges and start anew, which led me to move to Delhi. After facing numerous difficulties in the relationship, I made the difficult decision to return home but my family didn’t approve and insisted that I needed to figure things out on my own,” she shared.

Rupmani didn't start her studies again and complete her high school education until after her divorce in 2011. Later on, she would graduate with a bachelor's in sociology. “Living in Delhi ultimately provided me with the opportunity to connect with other Deaf individuals in my early twenties,” she added.