Sharada Fatehpuria

Sharada Fatehpuria founded Manovikas Kendra in Kolkata, one of the earliest multi-disciplinary institutions in India for children and adults with disabilities. She completed a doctorate in applied psychology in 1966 and set out to build a place for children whom the school system of the time made no provision for.

Manovikas Kendra began in 1974 in a small space on Short Street, Kolkata, housed at Abhinav Bharati School. Fatehpuria's position, recorded on the institution's own account of its founding, was simply that these children should have a school of their own. Government support followed in 1982; services for children with hearing impairment were added in 1984, and centres opened at Purulia in 1985 and Dhankhet in 1986. The organisation was registered as a society in 1990, acquired its own land in 1991, and had its foundation stone laid by the West Bengal chief minister Jyoti Basu in 1993. It moved to New Alipore in 1995 and to its present campus at Mukundapur in 1997, where the premises were inaugurated by President K. R. Narayanan in 1999.

The institution she built combined education, therapy and research rather than treating them separately. It began teacher training in special education in 2000 with twenty trainees, opened a biomedical research unit and a hydrotherapy unit the same year, started a BEd in special education under Jadavpur University in 2005 and was given nodal agency status by the National Trust. Its services now cover assessment and therapy, education, vocational training, molecular diagnostics and open schooling, for conditions including autism, ADHD, Down syndrome, intellectual disability, hearing and speech impairment and specific learning difficulties. Manovikas Kendra marked fifty years of work in 2024.[2][3]