A part of 9 Para Special Forces, Major Vivek Jacob met with an accident while training and injured his spine in 2015.

While in the hospital, he met Flight Lieutenant Bhaduria who was paralysed waist-down for the last four years due to an accident.

The Major observed closely how his friend was losing hope in his life due to his condition. A swimming enthusiast, the Lieutenant would often ask the Major, “Will I ever scuba dive again?”

“I had time on my hands and I started to research and found what people have done despite disabilities. I showed those videos to him and all he could say was, ‘I don’t think this is possible for me,’” he recalls.

The sight of his dejected friend was unbearable to the Major. He promised his friend to help him dive again. The quest to help his friend led him to a path in an entirely different direction.

It was while brainstorming ideas to help his friend, the major came across many other people like him who would want to do the same.

He also found out that the cost to acquire the resources and training was much more expensive than anticipated.

“I realised that making this available for one person would be expensive and that there must be many out there who want to do the same thing. This is when I decided to do it on a larger scale,” he says.

Presently, the Major is the founder of CLAW and has trained 200 people with disabilities in different adventure sports.

“CLAW Global is not just an organisation that trains people with disabilities, but it also tries to reinstill hope among them. I could see the positive energy they had and wanted to harness it in the right direction,” he says.

Now with a core team of six members along with 10 other members, the organisation trains individuals with disabilities — such as paralysis, terminal diseases, visual impairments, and amputees — in adventure sports.

The organisation also has two more programmes along the same lines namely, Land World Record and Soul of Steel - Himalaya. “We trained a team of eight people — four people with visual impairment, three upper limb amputees, and one leg amputee — and took them on a nine-day expedition to the Siachen Glacier and back,” he explains.

He is also planning to expand the Land World Record programme into Air and Water World Record programmes where he will train persons with disabilities to do independent sky diving and water diving.