The fix is to build classrooms that assume disabled students can handle the full material, and design the route there. This year, for once, the route is already paved and paid for. Give the stool. Not the pity. And skip the applause
Nepal's classrooms are entering their biggest technology push yet. The government has promised high-speed internet, digital materials, and AI-based learning in 10,000 community schools, backed by a budget of more than 200 billion rupees. Smart boards are coming.
And I keep thinking about a blackboard.
I lost my sight before I lost my faith in Nepal's classrooms. The second loss took longer. It happened slowly, in small everyday ways. For years, I believed I was a weak student. Especially in maths.
My teachers in Kathmandu taught pi the only way they knew how: by drawing a circle on the blackboard and pointing at it. I could hear the chalk. I could hear the explanation. The one thing I could not do was see the diagram that made everything obvious to everyone else.
My teachers did what they believed was kind. They skipped the visual parts, handed me the formula, and moved on. When I got stuck, someone would tell me the answer instead of showing me the way.
None of them meant harm; the fault belongs to a system, not to them. They responded to a blind child with the only tool they had: sympathy. But sympathy is not teaching. Sympathy protects a child from struggle. Teaching insists on the kind of struggle that leads somewhere.
Years later, a teacher outside that system placed a bottle cap and a piece of thread in my hands. Wrap the thread around the rim, he said. Now lay it straight across the middle. The length around came to a little more than three times the length across.
A bigger cap gave the same result. I could feel it between my fingers: no matter the size of the circle, the relationship never wavered. Pi stopped being a number I had memorised and became something I understood. The concept had not changed. I had not changed. Only the teaching had.
I am not an inspiration, and I am not an exception. I am a natural outcome. Give a disabled child real teaching instead of sympathetic shortcuts, and a capable adult is what you should expect.
A simple picture shows the difference. A person stands in a kitchen, unable to reach the top shelf. Is the person too short, or is the shelf too high? Argue either side and you miss the point. The problem is the gap between the two, and the answer is a stool.
Nepal's classrooms, in my day, treated the student as the problem. When I studied abroad, I found stools everywhere. Computers read every lesson aloud, built into the system rather than bolted on as a favour. Professors assumed I would do the same work and asked what format I needed. Nothing lowered the bar. Everything removed a gap that came from design, not from my ability.
I was away for more than a decade. Now the money has finally reached the classrooms. The plans do mention disability: assistive technology, trained teachers, inclusive schools. But nowhere is accessibility a condition of the digital purchase itself. No line requires a lesson to work for a student who cannot see the screen.
A recent report from Achham described blind students in a school still lacking blind-friendly infrastructure even as digital upgrades begin. Where physical access is neglected, digital access will not arrive unasked. The barrier was never money; the money is here. The barrier is a mindset: the assumption that a disabled student's ceiling should be set by sympathy rather than capacity. A blind child in 2026 is still being handed answers instead of tools. And the diagram that child cannot see will soon glow on a smart board.
For the first time, though, the stool is within reach. A chalk diagram can be made touchable for one student by one determined teacher; my bottle cap proved it. But that fix cannot scale. Digital materials can.
In the age of AI, one accessible lesson, built correctly from the start, can reach every student in every school at once. It comes down to two decisions. Buy devices every student can use. Require every digital lesson to be built so every student can learn from it. One question, asked before the money is spent: can every student in the room use this? Nepal has tens of thousands of school-age disabled children, and by some estimates nearly a third are out of school. My generation was excluded because the tools never reached us. If the next generation is excluded, it will be a choice.
I will not pretend education acted alone. Luck carried much of the weight, and that is the problem. A family that pushed on doors never built to open. A scholarship that existed. A visa that came through. A teacher who reached for a bottle cap. Remove any one, and my story ends differently. In a working system, luck is a footnote in a child's education. In ours, it decides everything.
The fix is to build classrooms that assume disabled students can handle the full material, and design the route there. This year, for once, the route is already paved and paid for. Give the stool. Not the pity. And skip the applause.
Because somewhere in Nepal right now, a blind child is being told the answer to a problem that a bottle cap and a piece of thread could teach them to solve. The thread costs nothing. The expectation is the expensive part, and it is long overdue.
Basukala is the Chief Executive Officer of Prime College and Prime Education Group
