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"Getting
India to read, quickly" Business Standard |
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| interesting to those who
can barely read, and spread a liking for books, "The books, with
colourful illustrations and pictures, are aimed at children who do
not have many avenues to read good books," says Suzanne Singh,
trustee of Pratham Books. Now there are over 100 libraries spread across Bangalore, with 10 nodal libraries. Seven more are in the pipeline. The books are carried by mobile librarians from nodal libraries to children, mostly living in slums. The children are then encouraged to read what they like. This, Suzanne Singh says, "helps deal with the anomaly of children of fifth or even seventh standard not being able to read, as shown by a study in Mumbai slums." Many a child goes through school for years and still cannot even read. To take an example, the per child expenditure of Rs 8,000 over four years is almost wasted. This can be retrieved by investing less than Rs 100 per child or even a tenth of that if school teachers use the technique innovated by Pratham. Pratham, through its Read India project, has chosen to focus on reading skills and not on literacy and primary schooling per se to address the problem of school-goers and supposed literates having difficulty in reading. Its argument is that if you can get someone to read and make reading an enjoyable experience, you not only make sure that literacy is not just a matter of spurious statistics but also tackle the problem of dropouts. Despite this utilitarian emphasis, a critical problem remains. With India's army of illiterates and 80 million non-school going children, you need a solution that will solve the problem in a few years. This is where Pratham comes in. It shows a way, that has already showed that it works, whereby reading skills can be passed on in less than six weeks. Prathama seeks to achieve the national and global goal of 'universal elementary education' through a mass scale, rapid, 'leanning to read' programme as a foundation. This is based on a system developed by Prof. Jalaluddin of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, where learning is done more through play and what the children like to do. Read India is about getting every child reading in a short, predictable time frame. Of course, reading is not the end, but it is the first step. Already 1,50,000 children have taken this step. Bangalore has 11,000 children. The possibilities are phenomenal. If the project is adopted on the right scale, it can shrink the number of illiterate children in India by 50 million in just a few months! All that stands in the way of this is institutional backing -- not will, not expertise. Madhav Chavan, Pratham's founder, expects that with the continuing support of state governments, it should be possible to reach out to all these children within five years, not 55. The institutional backing has come from, among others, Akshara Foundation. Says Rohini Nilekani, chairperson of Akshara Foundation: "If a child can read, she or he can internalise the locus of learning and is less dependent on a teacher or on the system." Once the child can learn, the child stays in school longer and enjoys school more. This, in turn, can prevent the alarming drop-out rates in government schools which is close to 80 per cent. There are two reasons for Pratham's confidence in making Read India work: i) the large scale success already achieved for over a decade and ii) Pratham has years of experience in bringing together government, the corporate sector and individuals in pursuit of a common goal. The Read India project, which is Prathama plus institutional backing, started in January 2003. Over the last few months, the project's technique has been replicated and scaled up in seven different states and five different languages -- Hindi, Marathi, Gujrati, Kannada, and Urdu. Now, the project is morphing into a campaign to catalyse learning on a massive scale. In 2003-04, it is likely to affect over 5 million children. |
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Copyrights Pratham Books, 2005
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