Irfan Sharif who suffers from hearing impairment invented a Traffic Surrounding Notifier device, for deaf people which made it easier for the authorities to issue driver’s licenses to people suffering from hearing impairment.
Event organized for deaf people to give driver licenses to four people with hearing impairment in Pakistan from the chief minister of Sindh province in Karachi.
42 year old Mansoor Abdul Majeed, who works at a local factory and received his license from the chief minister, said “The provincial administration of Sindh deserves the credit for this, especially its Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities (DEPD) that made us the first Pakistanis to secure our legal right to drive”.
He further said “I was fighting for this right for several years. The traffic police told us that we could not drive since we could not hear anything. After getting disappointed by the license branch, I discussed the idea with my friend, Irfan Sharif, who invented the device which we used to convince the authorities.”
Irfan Sharif is a school teacher and part-time programmer who was born with hearing impairment, started working on the idea of developing a device that could help fulfill the legal requirements of driver’s license in 2017. He found a gadget that vibrated and flashed when his baby cried and decided to turn it in the traffic surrounding notifier system.
The light of the Traffic Surrounding Notifier system blinks on the dashboard of car whenever there is any sound signal, such as a horn or an ambulance siren, a light blinks on the dashboard of the car or motorbike and the driver can look into the rearview or side mirrors and act accordingly.
Irfan Sharif informed that a non-governmental organization, named Danish Kada, and Zaigham M. Rizvi extended the financial help to install the device in 25 cars.
Director of the DEPD Ghulam Nabi Nizamani told “Not only the persons with disability took it as a joke, but the Supreme Court, which has been hearing a constitutional petition, called the census count flawed and ordered a fresh survey of 300,000 households across Pakistan to estimate the number of persons with disabilities”.
Chief Minister sindh Murad Ali Shah said that his administration was doing its best to educate people with physical impairments, adding it had converted schools of special children into rehabilitation centers.
He said “I have allocated five percent quota for differently abled persons in government service. This is the reason that our government has created a separate full-fledged department so that differently abled people can be empowered.”
Irfan Sharif informed that we have been driving cars for years. But now we will be driving them legally. The development will help us reduce our dependence on others.
He urging the traffic police to issue licenses for motorcycles as well since that would benefit a large segment of his community members.