Akash Acharya

Founder

Founder of The Indian Stammering Association

Akash Acharya is the founder of The Indian Stammering Association [1], an Indian non-profit working on healthcare.

Akash Acharya (died May 2017) was an Indian academic and self-help activist who was among the founding members of The Indian Stammering Association (TISA), a community of people who stammer. He organised the association's first face-to-face meeting, held in Mumbai on 13 April 2008, after which TISA took shape as a community. He was an assistant professor at the Centre for Social Studies in Surat, Gujarat.

TISA's own account of its history credits its origins to Dr Satyendra (Sachin) Srivastava, a person who stammers and a social worker from Uttarakhand, with Acharya among the small group who came together to form it.

Career

Acharya worked as an assistant professor at the Centre for Social Studies, a research institute on the Veer Narmad South Gujarat University campus in Surat that is supported by the Indian Council of Social Science Research. His research concerned health care delivery models viewed from a societal perspective, and he visited universities in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany in a professional capacity.

From about 2006 he was part of an early, internet-based group of Indian people who stammer that had formed with encouragement from the International Stuttering Association. In April 2008 he organised the first in-person meeting of nine Indian people who stammer in Mumbai, at which the group decided to form an association, start a website, promote self-help groups and keep the organisational structure simple.

As a core group member of TISA he worked on building links with stammering associations in other countries, including Nepal, Pakistan, Mauritius, Germany, China, Denmark and Poland, and served on the advisory board of the International Stuttering Association. He took part in TISA's national conferences, including the 2016 conference in Goa.[2][3][4]

The Indian Stammering Association

TISA is a voluntary association founded, run and driven by people who stammer, for people who stammer. It runs self-help groups in cities across India along with a Foundation Program, mock interviews and presentation-skills training, focused on confidence and community rather than a claimed cure.