Amrita Roy Choudhury

Amrita Roy Chowdhury (born ) is an Indian social activist working for special children. She is the founder of Transcendent Knowledge Society, a NGO in Kolkata, India, which works for economic and social rehabilitation of differently abled people.

Amrita had spent more than 13 years in rehabilitating children with visual impairments and then decided to do something in the field of Mental Health, keeping an eye on children. She has impacted more than 3000 children to rehabilitate visually and worked extensively to get them into mainstream school. For her devotion and commitment in 2010 she was selected by the West Bengal State Government to develop in the Neuro development clinic in SSKM Government Hospital, to develop the vision department. This came as an inspiration to her, she started working for children with other multiple disabilities.[1]

Amrita after working special children, decided to move further a step to work with "Specially-abled adults" and ensure they lead a normal life and earn their living. Now, to earn for a living, one needs to be trained. In her NGO, she started imparting skill-based training and within a short span of time, parents who were bringing their children in the training classes discusses with Amrita, that the training in real-life job scenario will have less or no impact creating less opportunity in the corporate world and then what, Amrita and five parents decided to start something of their own, a cafe, with a difference. Amrita started training a group of "Specially-abled adults", aged between 20 and 40, suffering from autism, Down syndrome or some other cognitive handicap. From the scratch, she train them from what to wear—how to communicate? after an initial training, from the group, 16 were selected based on their performance. Then came the stage of actually training them in cooking, Amrita tried her best to get professional chefs to train them. 20 chefs rejected the cause though finally two chefs came forward and mentored the students for months from how to make tasty cookies to cup cakes. She decided to open the cafe and with the collaboration with South Kolkata's 'Parashmani', a parent-run organisation for special children and with one of her friend, who came forward to share a space in her store, Sip N Bite, the cafe got opened in 2018. The café is the only cafe in Kolkata, where from kitchen to account books,[2] everything is handled by people with cognitive disabilities. The cafe also puts up kiosks and stalls at corporate parks on request.