Blind student is IIT topper

Kharagpur, September 16, 2012(TNN): The concept of darkness is in the mind . For many sightless people , the world around is little more than a dark void. Not so for Pratish Datta. On Saturday , when he strode to the dais , aided by mother Ranjana to receive the Professor Jagadish Chandra Bose Memorial Gold Medal from President Pranab Mukherjee ,he had succeeded in proving that one sees through the mind , not the eyes . Pratish , who lost his eyesight when he was in college in Kolkata , was awarded for the best academic performance among outgoing students of the M.Sc courses in the science disciplines at the IIT. He is from the department of mathematics.

Pratish has already begun his PhD in cryptology and network technology at IIT. “My parents are my inspiration . They never made me feel that there was anything wrong. I received tremendous support from my teachers and buddies. My friend and classmate Fauzal Atik took great care of me at IIT,” Pratish said.

Pratish was six months old when doctors told his parents that he had ‘retinoschesis’ , in which the layers inside the retina gradually get separated from each other, eventually leading to total blindness. By Class VIII, he had to use high-powered magnifying glasses to study.

“His mother would read out his lessons to him,”said Pratish’s father Prabir Datta. “All the credit goes to his mother. He even ranked second in the country in GATE this year. We feel so proud. My boy is no different… Rather, he has proved better than many,”Datta said.

It was in his second year at St Xavier’s College that he lost his sight completely. Ranjana turned a full-time reader for her son and when he cracked IIT-JEE , she moved to Kharagpur with him. Pratish and his mother live in a rented apartment on the IIT-Kgp campus. “We received a lot of help from people . His IIT teachers and classmates were very kind. At St Xavier’s , College they would print question papers on A3 sheets for him,” Ranjana said.

His PhD guide Sourabh Mukhopadhyay is amazed at how a visually impaired person could score so high in asubject like Mathematics. “This has never happened in IIT, Kharagpur, or anywhere in the world,” he said.