Special Olympics Bharat gathers more than 625,000 signatures supporting the ban of the word “Retard”
The Signature Campaign is SO Bharat’s endeavor to delete the r-word or its equivalent in any Indian language while addressing intellectually disabled persons. Special Olympics Bharat hopes to bring dignity and respect to this amazing community and also sensitize the mainstream community to their needs while promoting Special Olympics and our amazing athletes.
Special Olympics started with the Youth in India as they are the future of the country! Students in schools were asked to bring in 30 to 50 signatures pledging their respect to make a conscious effort not to let others around them disrespect our community of intellectually disabled persons. This was turned into a competition. Every school that brings in 5000 signatures would get a certificate of merit signed by Chairman SO Bharat and Director – Intel corp., South Asia. The School that brings in the Maximum signatures would get the Eunice Kennedy Shriver Rolling Trophy, a cash prize of one hundred thousand rupees sponsored by Intel and a certificate of Merit.
The state director who brings in participation from the maximum number of schools from his state/union territory would get a Rolling Trophy, a cash prize of fifty thousand rupees and a certificate of Merit. Prize Distribution would be in November 2010. We are hoping to get Dr. APJ Kalam , Past President of India, as the Chief Guest.
It took a while to communicate and convince the state directors of the benefit of launching a signature campaign. Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal were the first ones to respond. Please see below for the number of signatures collected by each state so far.
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Andhra Pradesh
290,000 signatures
(From 50 schools in Hyderabad/ Secundrabad)
•
Bihar
201,752 signatures
(From 38 districts)
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Rajasthan
080,000 signatures
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West Bengal
042,000 signatures
•
Maharashtra
010,000 signatures
•
Simla
001000 signatures
•
Karnataka
001000 signatures
Total Signatures
625,752
We are confident that we could sensitize and bring in at least 10 million signatures before November 2010 as many other state Directors have committed their support.
In addition to this we had in early 2009 made presentations to and written to many Corporate Companies who have directly endorsed their support by signing into www.r-word.org
Signature Campaign at the Cricket Coaching Camp in Bangalore one day after 26/11/2008…organized by SO Bharat Karnataka and British Council
Signature Campaign in Kolkata
1500 participants and 200 volunteers from Tata Consultancy Services, Kolkata
