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 illiterates in the country is enormous. Officially, only one third of India is illiterate. Only one third! That’s well over 300 million people. Surveys recently have shown that this is probably an underestimate, and the illiteracy rate is actually higher than this.

A population that is illiterate 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, AND we have to ensure that the kids at school right now are taught better so that they don’t drop out.

Currently in India it takes between 6 months to 2 years to teach people to read.

Multiply that by hundreds of millions. It represents a staggering amount of effort, persistence, patience and manpower to make even the smallest dent.

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!

Preliminary results indicate that the ReadingWise method as used in Tara Akshar teaches adults to read in less than a month, and doesn't need a qualified teacher. Children tend to learn quicker. All it needs is a computer and a willing instructor who has had one week’s intensive training from our trainers.