Paraplegic Rehabilitation Centre, Pune

The Paraplegic Rehabilitation Centre — everyone calls it PRC — is India's largest rehabilitation centre for spinal injury, and one of the largest in South East Asia. It is home to 117 ex-army residents living with paraplegia or quadriplegia, along with their families. The centre is run by senior officers of the Indian Army's Southern Command. Their motto is “focusing on ability over disability” — almost the same words Nadeem uses about himself.

PRC was founded in 1974, after the 1971 Indo-Pak War left many soldiers with spinal injuries that ended their careers but not their lives. The centre was modelled on Stoke Mandeville Hospital in the UK — the place where the Paralympic movement began. PRC was inaugurated by then-President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed. For more than fifty years it has been a place where soldiers with spinal injuries do not just recover, but rebuild lives.

One of the things PRC does for its residents is art. Many of them paint — some with their mouths, some with limited hand movement, some using adapted tools. They are not painting to sell. They are painting to feel like themselves again. Painting is part of healing. It restores identity, dignity, and the experience of making something with your own intent.

When we first started designing SPARSH, we thought it was for professional IMFPA artists like Nadeem and Bandenawaz. Then we visited PRC. Watching residents paint — some for ten minutes at a time before needing to rest, some unable to reach beyond a small area, almost all depending on a staff member to hand them paints or change their water — we realised SPARSH needed to do more.

Two design decisions came directly from what we saw at PRC. AI-Assisted Mode, where SPARSH draws the structural outline and the artist adds the colour, matters most for residents who can only paint in short bursts and cannot complete a detailed painting in one sitting. And the automatic tool changer — which switches colours without a helper — matters most for residents who otherwise depend on staff for everything. For the first time, they can manage their own colours and finish a painting alone. The same need came from Nadeem and Bandenawaz too. Three artists. Three settings. The same answer.