There are 130 million children in India’s primary schools (Grades 1-5), spread across 600,000 villages.  40% will leave schooling before completing Grade 5.  60% of these school dropouts will be girls.  Half the children completing primary education will not be able to read functionally, e.g., the headlines of a newspaper.  There are also 127 million children, below age six, likely to enter primary schooling with practically no pre-school preparation.

 

Most of the 257 million pre-school and in-school children will never experience reading from children’s books.  Yet, a majority of them will grow up watching cartoons, increasingly, on mobile phones and other digital media.  AniBooks make reading an inescapable by-product of cartoon viewing.

 PlanetRead and BookBox innovated the concept of an AniBook, to create a reading experience for children, in an entertaining and audio-visual form.  Essentially, AniBooks are animated stories with the narration appearing on screen as perfectly synchronized and highlighted subtitles, in the same language as the audio.  This reinforces text-sound associations that are typically weak among early-literate children. Once created in any one language, AniBooks can be adapted to other languages at a marginal cost.  Thus, AniBooks are well-suited to serve the diverse linguistic needs of India and, over time, other countries. There are already 250 million mobile subscribers in India and this figure is expected to double by 2010.  At present, PlanetRead is bringing reading to 200 million weak readers, through Bollywood film songs that are subtitled on TV in the “same” language.  In addition, we will have the potential to bring child-appropriate reading, via mobiles, to 100 million children. In addition: ProblemThere are an estimated 600 million literate people in India today.  In reality, half the so-called “literates,” around 300 million people, can best be called “early-literate.”  They cannot read, for example, the day’s newspaper headlines.Goal

The Same Language Subtitling (SLS) innovation aims to transition 300 million people in India, from a state of weak and fragile reading, to functional and fluent reading ability.

Strategy

PlanetRead and the Indian Institute of Management’s Same Language Subtitling (SLS) innovation is the simple idea of subtitling existing song-based programs on TV in the ‘same’ language as the audio.  It is the first initiative of its kind, anywhere in the world.  SLS has already woven regular reading practice into the lives of 150 million early-literate people in India, in their own language.

Over the last 10 years, SLS has been implemented on Bollywood film songs on TV in 10 languages.  SLS is extremely inexpensive.  For example, on a Hindi program: One US dollar gives weekly 30 minutes of reading practice to 5,000 people for one whole year.

Locations