PlanetRead - A small change for colossal gains in Literacy

Here is another innovative approach to solve India's illiteracy problem. Adopting the popular " Same language Subtitling" , Planetread hopes to educate early literate ( read it as semi-literate or rudimentary literate) people by having sub-titles in the same language on popular film songs.

NYT (The New York Times) calls it as " One of development marketplace's most effective idea" . Here is the website where you can see how it works ( Catch the lagaan song with sub-titles). PlanetRead is the venture of Brij Kothari ( An associate Prof at IIM-A) and his team. Among the partners of PlanetRead are Google.org, IIM-A,Doordarshan,Ministry of HRD - India.

After a long five year struggle, they have finally managed to convince DD to sub-title the following programs ( Chitrahaar & Rangoli - Hindi , Oliyum Oliyum - Tamil , Chitramanjari - Kannada, and the weekly movies in Bengali,Telugu, Kannada). More are likely to follow.

With a very minimal cost structure ( $1 to educate 10,000 people in a year) , this initiative is winning awards and raves everywhere. May such noble initiatives thrive !

P.S : Please visit the website PlanetRead (Click on underlined word) to know more about the initiative and explore some of the interesting stuff they have been doing !