How To Obtain TARA Akshar for Your Area

1. Find trainee instructors. We recommend that they are at least 18 years old, have about 10 years of schooling, and have good natural communication abilities.
2. Find premises. Any room will do. Or you can run it outdoors.
3. Set up the computer. You must have:
• An electricity supply of at least a few hours per day.
• A desktop or a laptop computer that can run Macromedia Flash. A desktop costs less than Rs 20,000, and should be a lot cheaper next year.
• A UPS (uninterruptible power supply) that will run for at least one hour per lesson per day. We can provide long-life UPSs for you. In India they cost about Rs 5,000, but you will need to spend Rs 10,000 if you are running batches all day.
4. Enrol students. It is important that students are very motivated, enough to attend every day for a month no matter what, so we recommend that this step is done very thoroughly. Selling the student's family on the idea, as well as the student, is strongly recommended.

What we will do for you

• We will put your instructors through our 6 day intensive training course. Not only will they learn all about the TARA Akshar software, but they will learn how to control students, how to communicate to them, how to use the computer, what to do when things go wrong, how to handle slow students and how to get outstanding graduates. An instructor trained by us is trained on exceptionally powerful communication techniques that will stand them in good stead in any future career.
• We will apprentice your instructors for about 3 weeks during their first batches.
• We will certify your instructors when we are confident that they meet our exacting standards.
• We will require your instructors re-certify every year. We will inspect them regularly throughout the year to make sure their standards stay high, and order retrains where necessary. The secret to great results in this program is the supervision of trainers.
• We will provide you with the necessary supplies for running the course: playing cards, flash cards, special TARA Akshar writing books, special TARA Akshar alphabet posters.

Cost

In India, it costs about Rs 2,500 (US$ 60)to put an illiterate through the course and graduate. This includes our costs and the amortised costs of the computer and your costs. This includes initial training, internship, certification and inspections. Renewal of certification every year is mandatory and involves up to a week in retraining, learning new techniques and briefing and installation of new software.

In doing your costings, you should estimate that one trainer can create up to 200 literate students per year.