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| Brij Kothar |
Once SLS became a national TV programme, Brij Kothari founded PlanetRead (www.planetread.org) in 2004, mainly to tap into funding from foundations, both in the US and India.
PlanetRead’s “karaoke” approach to literacy provides automatic and regular reading practice to over 200 million early-literates in India. In addition, nearly 270 million illiterate people are motivated to become literate.
Kothari and his associates are also developing models to deliver the reading experience to children through animated stories on TV and mobiles, in partnership with a social venture, BookBox (www.bookbox.com).
Since 2006, SLS has been implemented on 8-10 weekly TV programmes on the Doordarshan network in a variety of languages. “Although we give a limited exposure of 30 minutes for weekly reading practice, our research in the Hindi belt has found that regular exposure at home over 3-5 years more than doubles the number of functional readers among primary school children. Among adults, newspaper reading also went up from 34 per cent to 70 per cent over 5 years, as compared to a baseline increase to 42 per cent among non regular viewers,” explains Kothari.
10 paise/person/year
Annually, SLS services on a weekly TV programme of 30 minutes (52 episodes) costs around Rs10 lakhs. “As millions of viewers get reading practice, on average, it costs 10 paise/person/year,” explains Brij.
When asked why SLS has been restricted to Doordarshan group of channels only, Brij says “Doordarshan has partnered with us for the sake of literacy, which clearly falls under its public service broadcasting role. Private channels, unfortunately, are not easily driven by the logic of contributing to national good. However, our efforts are on.”
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| SLS: Going Strong The numbers are impressive. Currently, the SLS programme reaches these many early literates: Hindi states, Hindi, 50 million Maharashtra, Marathi, 17 million Gujarat, Gujarati, 8 million Punjabi, Punjab, 4 million Tamil, Tamil Nadu, 21 million Kannada, Karnataka, 16 million Telugu, Andhra Pradesh, 11 million Bengali, West Bengal, 25 million All India, 8 languages, 152 million |
The Power of Perseverance
The programme’s literacy impact results were shared with the National Literacy Mission, which in turn referred them to an internal expert, who essentially said that this was nothing new and that viewers with weak reading skills would ignore the subtitles.
The DD Directorate in New Delhi was also not too excited about SLS during 2000-2002, despite the pilot on DDK, Ahmedabad. Then SLS won a global innovation competition: Development Marketplace at the World Bank, and notched up a $250,000 grant.
It was this feat that got SLS a place for the first time on a DD1 programme, Chitrahaar and Rangoli. Soon, the programme was facilitated in different languages and states.
“Now DD has gone from asking us to pay for allowing us to add SLS on their programmes to allowing it for free, as long as we cover the entire cost of SLS. So the onus of SLS services is on us. We have been successful so far and are making every effort to move it in policy,” explains Kothari.
The Chairperson of Prasar Bharati, Mrinal Pande is now considering the scaling up of SLS nationally. “Our policy proposal is simple: SLS on every song on DD, in every language,” says Kothari.
Finding the Funding
“Prior to 2006, the major funding we got was from Development Marketplace (World Bank). We also received about 10% from MHRD. During 2006-present, in different phases, the major funders for SLS services have been Google Foundation, Sir Ratan Tata Trust, Dell, and an anonymous donor,” says Kothari.
Future Plans
Kothari says that once SLS becomes a policy in India, other countries will take note. “Already there is growing international interest, especially in Africa, where the context is similar and they have their own music-videos on TV,” says Kothari.
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