Romila Tiwari at Barista and Simi Suri at HCL are not even aware that there is something uniquely common between them. Though they work for completely divergent companies, the HR executives have recruited differently-abled people in their organisations.

HCL and Barista are not alone in driving the effort to hire the differently-abled people. Hero Honda, too, has been employing speech and hearing impaired people as machinery operators. Currently, 40 such people are working at its Gurgaon plant and more are supposed to join its new plant at Haridwar in Uttarakhand.

Clearly, companies in the IT, hotel, manufacturing, telecom and banking sectors are shedding their biases and coming forward to employ people with different abilities. Welcoming the trend, Nootan Pandey, a senior psychologist at the Vocational Rehabilitation Centre says, "To find jobs, these people need special training and understanding rather than sympathy."

Luckily, the government-run training centres as well as some NGOs are meeting their special training requirements. After training, their salaries could vary according to their capabilities. While the average salary is usually between Rs 3,500 and Rs 5,000, it could go up as high as between Rs 15,000 and Rs 20,000.

Employers admit that they do face a challenge when they engage special people, but with a little help from the trainers they are able to overcome their problems. Once they understand their jobs, they prove to be better than other employees as they are focused and the attrition rate among them is lower. "The need is to tap their potential.

They are sincere and do not hop jobs, proving to be an asset to the organisation in the process," says Simi Suri of HCL. Romila Tiwari, who employed 13 such people in Barista in Delhi, recently seems happy with their performance. "The company is planning to look into new areas where more of them can be accommodated," she says.