Growing up in Chandrapur, Rahul Kelapure, assistant legal advisor at Securities and Exchange board of India (SEBI), wanted to devour books that extended beyond his school syllabus. It was not the paucity of material that was a hindrance, but its access. As a visually impaired person, reading, for him, meant Braille. His parents would often read out passages as there were no audiobooks at the time. "Because of my disability, I was always told that my resources are limited," he remembers. "But, there was a gnawing desire to read and learn whatever I wanted, just like everybody else."

Years later, Kelapure is putting his long-nurtured dream into action. Using Optical Character Recognition (the process by which scanned documents are translated into digital text), he is making books accessible to persons with visual impairment. "It is a system through which a hard copy can be converted to digital text, so that they can be read on the computer or on mobile phones with the help of screen reading softwares," he explains.