Why: India's Literacy Problem
Over one third of Indians above the age of 7 are illiterate.
(World Bank Development Policy Review 2003)
Valiant attempts have been made to make India more literate, but with the rise in population, the number of illiterate people in the country is enormous. Officially, only one third of India is illiterate. Only one third! That’s nearly 400 million people. Surveys recently have shown that this is a serious underestimate of the problem, because it ignores the semi-literates who also cannot read contracts, newspapers, family letters and official forms, sign and all the other stuff essential for functioning in a modern society.
A population that is illiterate or semi-literate will not be able to move out of the borderline agricultural existence in which it currently strives to survive. A population that can at least read and write can train on vocational skills and has a chance to create a viable economic system, where hunger, malnutrition, outrageous child mortality rates and dismal absence of primary health care and education can be addressed.
Behind the statistics are two realities – the adults (mostly rural, mostly female) who never learnt to read and never will, and the kids who drop out of school. Half of all Indian school kids right now drop out of Primary School. And of course, most of them have not learnt to read. If they had, there’s a much better chance they would have stayed on at school!
So we have to teach millions of adults, and we have to teach the millions of kids who are dropping out.
Currently in India, almost no one is teaching the illiterate and semi-literate population to read. The few attempts that are made take many months, mostly with large dropout rates.
That’s why we had to find a solution.
The Solution
If we could cut the time and effort it takes to teach reading to adult illiterates (and kids) to a fraction of the current time, we could then begin to anticipate the sort of literacy levels that most other countries have. Conventional wisdom is that it takes a long time, and the drop-out rates will always be high.
Well, we did find a way to slash conventional reading times. We went back to first principles, and constructed a hypothesis, like any good scientist, and tested the hypothesis, and it worked.