Ravi Srivastava recently wrote to us about his experience with Pratham Books. With his permission: I used to live in Chennai and purchased a number of Pratham Books’ (English, Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi).
I am currently working in Pakistan and had a chance to share some of the Urdu books with my colleagues in Islamabad (I gifted the books for their children’s use) and they were thrilled at the excellent quality—suitable themes, thoughtful content, easy language, attractive simple and colorful graphics, strong and attractive paper stock, easy to hold and use size—and the incredibly reasonable price of Pratham Books’.
I hope Pratham Books would consider adding some of its south Asian language books to the International Children’s Digital Library. There is no south Asian publisher of repute in the ICDL and content in south Asian languages is sadly lacking. This could further enhance Pratham Books’ already high reputation and also allow for more south Asian language books to be available to a world-wide audience.
I first heard of Pratham at a presentation by Mr. Madhav Chavan at the PanIIT 2008 in Madras (I am an alumnus of IIT Madras and was at the conference) and since then I have been a fan of Pratham Books.
I believe Pratham Books and Tulika Books have done well to put their respective children’s south Asian-language books into the world community of excellent publishers.
He further adds: Just two nights ago, my son (who has limited Hindi reading proficiency and has not had Hindi training for the past 6 months) happily read three of the “Tell me now” series of books in Hindi.
Please convey my compliments to the Pratham Books team: This is a model to emulate worldwide.
We have been speaking with the International Children’s Digital Library for a while now and the only reason we haven’t put our books up there yet is because of a resource crunch at our end. We hope to do this by the end of this year.
Thanks Ravi! Your kind words of appreciation means the world to us!