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Sabha 2011 – Why We Held This Literary Meet

The month of March was a fantastic one for us. We held two literary conferences called Sabha in Bangalore in Delhi. The Bangalore conference was about ‘The Joys and Challenges of Creating Multi-lingual Content for Children’ while the Delhi conference was about ‘Creating Joyful and Accessible Content for New Readers’.

Suzanne Singh, Managing Trustee of Pratham Books, writes about why we conducted these conferences this year.

Pratham Books turned seven recently. It was a time for us to reflect on all that we had achieved in these seven years. The statistics were impressive. 200 original titles in 11 languages. 1300 books – read about 25 million times. We believed that had significantly contributed to the landscape of children and reading in India.

All of this had been possible because we have a wonderful community of authors, illustrators, translators who create books for us. So we thought it would be good idea to organize literary meets in Delhi and Bangalore where we could collectively discuss the challenges and joys of creating multilingual content for children.

There were stimulating discussions and debates at both our Sabha sessions. We hope to carry on the tradition of bringing together like minded people who believe so strongly that books provide joy. And we can all put our collective strength to spread this joy to every child.

Via The Hindu

Speaking at the event, Chairperson of Pratham Books Rohini Nilekani, said: “This meet is one more step towards nurturing the ecosystem for better children’s books. There are 350 million children in India, and when we believe so strongly that books provide joy, we must all put our collective strength to spread this joy to every child.”

On their commitment to developing open content, Suzanne Singh, Managing Trustee of Pratham, said: “In a country with so many children in need of reading material, we need quick, clean, legal, and harmonious ways of developing content. In our effort to share content and be more inclusive, we have adopted the Creative Commons framework widely, and we have begun to see success with this.” Over 80 stories and illustrations are available under an open license model.

You can read the entire article here. You can also view pictures from Sabha 2011 here.

We will post a few more Sabha-related blog posts for those of you who missed the conference and for those who were interested in knowing what happened at the conferences. Stay tuned!
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