To address the issue of illiteracy in a meaningful manner and in a remarkably short time-period, TARAhaat, the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) arm of Development Alternatives Group, has developed an ICT-based literacy tool: TARA Akshar+. TARA Akshar+ is one of the fastest literacy programmes in the world that teaches a completely illiterate Hindi- speaking individual to read, write and perform arithmetic in 49 days. All it needs is a computer and a willing instructor who has undergone one week training.

TARA Akshar+ has achieved unprecedented success in barely four years since its rollout. The success of the programme can be judged from the fact that till date, over 57,646 rural women have been made literate through its TARA Akshar Centres in six states - Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Haryana and Rajasthan. The programme achieved an average success rate of 97 percent and an average dropout rate of less than 1 percent.

This programme has been financed by the Department for International Development (DFID) under its Poorest Areas Civil Society (PACS) programme, Connect for Change, UK, Suzlon Foundation, Oxfam India Trust, Telecentre.org - a consortium of the Canadian & Swiss Governments and Microsoft, TARAhaat, Seva Mandir and now being evaluated for Saakshar Bharat Mission 2010 through various State Resource Centres.

The economic boom in India has ensured a lavish life for some people. But even after 63 years of Independence, the country is home to the largest number of illiterate people on earth.

A whopping 400 million people still cannot read and write the language they speak. It is one of the major causes of the country’s socio-economic backwardness. Poverty and under-development are the associated ills of illiteracy. Literacy forms the cornerstone for ensuring equality of opportunity to all. It leads to increased self-confidence, self-esteem and awareness levels amongst neo-literates.

It allows people, especially women, to participate much more effectively in the development and decision-making processes at the grassroots. It also helps to increase the status of women in the family as well as in society, and leads to gender equity. With no concerted action, illiteracy can impede growth and development of the country.

Valiant attempts have been made to increase the literacy level in India but the number of illiterate people in the country is still enormous. Over one third of Indians above the age of seven are illiterate (World Bank Development Policy Review 2003). It can be attributed partly to the ever-growing population and partly to the failure of the government literacy programmes. Currently, in India, it takes between

6 months to 2 years to teach people to read and write. The poor and the marginalized, who constitute the majority of the illiterates in India, either fail to muster courage to enroll into a literacy programme or lose steam mid-way and drop out because of the staggering amount of time and effort it takes to get literate through conventional methods. Most of the illiterates, especially adults, work as wage laborers, domestic household workers and farm laborers. They are often forced to migrate to towns and cities in search of work; so, they fail to complete a literacy programme. Thus, TARA Akshar+ seeks to bring literacy to the door step of the poor and marginalized in a short time and at affordable cost.

TARA Akshar+ trains students to recognize the sound of the letter. It is followed by training them in syllables, and then lets them loose on words and sentences followed by addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. The conventional wisdom is that the hardest part of learning is to recognize the combination of letters and numeracy . But if the student has an instantaneous, instinctive, intuitive recognition of all the letters and numeracy that he or she is reading, all the subsequent stages of learning to read become very easy. The astounding success that the TARA Akshar+ programme has met proves this point.

TARA Akshar+ has come up with a method of teaching this first step of learning letters including numeracy in a revolutionary way, by the use of memory associations embedded in animated movies. Learning is reinforced with other memory techniques, together with video gaming techniques. In TARA Akshar+, the students do not have to memorize anything; rather he or she simply watches and plays, which in turn takes care of the memorizing.

TARA Akshar+ is a Flash-based software that has been developed in-house by the TARAhaat. The software uses morphing and memory techniques to teach completely illiterate people to learn, read and write Hindi (Devanagri) and arithmetic in 49 days . For example, the letter ‘d’ in Hindi is associated to one’s memory by a morphed image of two ears joined together. The entire alphabet and numeracy is taught in this manner. This technique is also supplemented with audio-visual and voice-based content.

TARA Akshar+ uses a combination of different media in order to attack the problem from as many media angles as possible. Students watch animated cartoon movies featuring the letters of the alphabet and numeracy, who turn into characters that have adventures with each other. Students also play card games with special cards featuring letters of the alphabet and numeracy. 100 minutes like this constitutes one day’s lesson. Students are required to attend one lesson a day, 6 days a week, until the 49 days are up.

At present, TARA Akshar+ is being offered through TARA Akshar centers located in small villages. As people become literate, they aspire for higher education and employable skills. TARA Akshar centres, which have a laptop computer and an instructor.

"Its not just the software, its the whole administration of the project that is making it a success", says Colonel Ahluwalia, the Chief Project Officer for TARA Akshar.

"We train the instructors with a very intensive and thorough training course. An instructor trained by us really knows how to hold a class together." The instructors are not just left to get on with it. They are monitored by ‘Master Trainers’, who are their technical mentors and by ‘Quality Controllers’, who spend their weeks appearing at random, at different centers to do spot checks on the quality of instructor training.

TARA Akshar+ has provided literacy to over 57,000 females and the number is continuously mounting. TARAhaat and Development Alternatives are keen to help these women translate literacy into some kind of socio-economic benefit for them. For this, TARAhaat has already planned to bring the benefits to TARA Akshar learners. Some of the initiatives taken in this direction are as follows:

Anecdotal evidence from our 57,000 plus graduates shows a dramatic increase in self-esteem and consequent improvement in intra-family dynamics. More and more newly literates are coming forward and demanding more reading material. In most centres, reading clubs have been organized voluntarily by the respective Sarpanch or CSO; and reading material has been provided by either of them. The Panchayats or Pradhans support by providing a room for the center’s building space, generator and extra reading material. There is a long waiting list of learners in most centres.

The model adopted for TARA Akshar+ has not only helped in acquiring scales in a relatively short period of time, but has also made the delivery of the programme more effective. Today, over 57,000 women have become literate in four years spread across six states in India. While the usage of multimedia and short time duration has ensured a low dropout rate, the unique delivery model has helped it to achieve a high success rate.

It’s not only about providing reading, writing and numeracy skills but its also about transforming lives and transforming the nation. TARA Akshar+ has an answer to the plight of a person who can speak and understand a language but cannot read, write and do the calculations. The programme has huge potential to scale and transform the lives of people by bringing them through a journey of "Angoothe se kalam tak" (From thumb to pen). For more information visit www.taraakshar.com and www. tarahaat.com q

Colonel M S Ahluwalia is Chief Project Officer, TARA Akshar. Colonel Ahluwalia has been an Indian Army officer, specialized in running training operations and was a seasoned flying instructor. His expertise in managing large scale training operations has been vital to the success of TARA Akshar implementation.

msahluwalia@tarahaat.com