Visually Impaired Bandipora Youth Cracks UPSC, Inspires Kashmir | Kashmir Life

SRINAGAR: In the Mirpora locality of Naidkhai village in north Kashmir’s Bandipora, celebrations are underway after a visually impaired youth, Irfan Ahmad Lone, qualified the prestigious civil services examination conducted by the Union Public Service Commission, securing an All India Rank of 957.

According to The Times of India, the Lone family has set up a large tent outside their modest one-storey house to welcome the stream of villagers arriving to congratulate them, something usually done in Kashmir during weddings.

“Irfan called me from Delhi on Friday evening and said he had qualified the exam. We had been waiting for this day for many years. I cannot describe what I felt. I just cried with joy,” his father Bashir Ahmad Lone, a daily-wage labourer in the Flood and Irrigation Department, told the newspaper.

According to ETV Bharat, the 30-year-old candidate, currently working as an assistant administrative officer with the Life Insurance Corporation of India in Delhi, said he wanted to prove that physical disability cannot prevent someone from achieving success.

“I was doing a job and I am financially strong, but I wanted to send out a message that a blind person can also qualify the UPSC exam,” Lone said.

Irfan’s journey to success was marked by tragedy early in life. As a child, a neighbourhood boy accidentally pierced his eye with a syringe, damaging his vision. Soon after joining school, another accident left his second eye severely injured when a pencil struck it during a fall.

His father said the family took him to the Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences and later to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi where he underwent numerous surgeries, but his eyesight could not be restored.

Determined to ensure his son received an education, Bashir eventually enrolled him at the Model School for the Visually Handicapped in Dehradun. Irfan later graduated from Hindu College and completed a master’s degree in political science from Jawaharlal Nehru University.

His father said Irfan cleared the preliminary stage of the civil services examination in his first attempt, reached the mains in the second, and finally succeeded in his third attempt.

Villagers say Irfan’s achievement has inspired the entire region. “His success shows that if students work hard they can achieve anything,” a neighbour, Mohammad Aslam Lone, told The Times of India.

Lone is among 16 candidates from Jammu and Kashmir who qualified the civil services examination this year. Since Shah Faesal topped the examination in 2011, the civil services have drawn increasing interest among youth in the region.

For Irfan’s family, however, the moment represents the culmination of years of struggle. Bashir said he had even sold ancestral land to support his son’s treatment and education.

“Those were tough times,” he said, “but tough times don’t last.”