Cerebral Shangrila

Thursday, February 23, 2006

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 !

3 Comments:

  • Visited the website. This is so cool. I got to practice my Hindi which I learnt over ten years ago!

    The idea is pretty solid. I'm, in some sense, a semi-literate in Hindi and I can clearly see for myself that this idea works!!

    Quite sad to hear that it took them five years to convince DD.

    By Blogger Dinesh, at 8:56 AM  

  • good website...
    So started your R&D again?
    How about writing about Satellite Radios

    By Blogger ILA (a) இளா, at 12:59 PM  

  • Dinesh -- Thanks.

    Ila -- thanks. Sat radios ? Ennake seriya theriyadhu except that XM,sirius keep making noise all the time !

    By Blogger Cogito, at 10:42 PM  

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