History

Ready to take a trip down memory lane?
This is our story so far.

Ready to take a trip down memory lane?
This is our story so far.

2004

Pratham Books was set up by Rohini Nilekani, Ashok Kamath and Rekha Menon. As principal founder and donor, Rohini helped direct the strategy and vision of the organisation as Chairperson from January 2004 to December 2013.

2006

Launched Story Cards – cost-effective mini storybooks that bring to life an entire tale in four pages. Millions of story cards have been used extensively in large scale literacy programmes across several states in India.

2008

Pratham Books was one of six publishers in India selected to print and distribute 4 million books and 4 million story cards to 70,000 government schools in all 37 districts of Bihar through the Bihar Department of Education.

2009

A massive pan-India launch of the book, Cauvery, saw thousands of pledges collected from children across the country promising to save water. This was Pratham Books' first book printed on recycled paper using biodegradable ink.

2010

Launched Library-in-a-Classroom – a portable wall-mounted library of up to 120 storybooks in multiple Indian languages that can be found in classrooms, large and small, across India.

2011

The pilot programme of Reading Champions – Pratham Books’ initiative to enlist volunteers to help children in their communities discover the joy of reading through exciting events and storytelling sessions – was implemented.

2012

250+ volunteers signed up to be Pratham Books’ Reading Champions, and the International Literacy Day Champions programme made it to the Limca Book of Records. This initiative has grown to a community of 5700+ volunteers today.

2014

Launched the Adi Kahani series – a set of 10 tribal stories and 4 song cards illustrated by tribal artists in four of the many tribal languages spoken in Odisha that do not have a script of their own – Kui, Munda, Saura, Juanga.

2015

Launched StoryWeaver – a digital library of free children’s stories that enables every child to have open access to stories in their mother tongue language. Launched Donate-a-Book – a unique crowdfunding platform to help build libraries for the children who need them the most.

2016

Launched the Missed Call Do, Kahaani Suno campaign, which distributed audio stories through mobile phones at zero cost to the children who listened to them.

2017

Launched a series of Phone Stories to engage children with short stories using words, moving images and sound, to be listened to and watched by children, parents, and educators on mobile phones.

2020

Published storybooks to help children navigate their feelings and the new normal brought on by Covid-19, and for the first time published books in the tribal languages of Kurmali, Sadri, Mundari and Kurukh.

2021

Launched Goshticha Shaniwar (A Saturday of Stories), a 5 month long Reading Programme encouraging learning through stories in Marathi, Urdu and English. Impacting 260,000 teachers and anganwadi workers, and 2.5 million children in 100,000 schools and anganwadis across all 36 districts of the state, this initiative kept the learning journey unbroken for millions of children in Maharashtra during the pandemic.