Even after 60 years of independence, India is home to a whopping 400 million illiterate people on earth. Illiteracy, a major cause of socio-economic conflict, also results in poverty and under development.
 
Literacy forms the cornerstone for making the provision of equality and opportunity a reality. It leads to increased self-confidence, self-esteem and awareness levels among the neo-literates. It allows people, especially women, to participate much more effectively in decision-making processes at the grassroots. For women, it helps tremendously in increasing their status in the family as well as in the society and leads to gender equity. Without any concerted action, illiteracy can impede growth and development of the country.
 
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 because of the failure of the government programmes on literacy. Currently, in India, it takes between 6 months to 2 years to teach people to read and write. The poor and the marginalized, who also constitute the majority of the illiterates in India, either fail to muster the 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 become literate using conventional methods. Most of the illiterate people, especially adults, work as wage labourers, domestic household workers and farm labourers and are often forced to migrate to towns and cities in search of work and, therefore, fail to complete a literacy programme.

To address the issue of illiteracy in a meaningful manner and in a remarkably short time period, TARAhaat, the ICT branch of the Development Alternatives Group, has developed a literacy tool, TARA Akshar. TARA Akshar is one of the fastest literacy programmes in the world that teaches completely illiterate Hindi-speaking women to read and write in just 30 days. All it needs is a computer and a willing instructor who has undergone a week’s training.

TARA Akshar has achieved unprecedented success in a short span of less than 10 months of its commencement. The success of the programme can be judged from the fact that by mid December 2007, nearly 25000 women have been made literate through 291 TARA Akshar centre spread over five Indian states – Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand and Haryana – with an average success rate of 97% and an average dropout rate of less than 1%.

TARA Akshar: How does it work?

TARA Akshar trains students to instantly recognize the sound of the letter, trains them in syllables, and then let them work on words and sentences. The conventional wisdom is that the hard part of the learning is to recognize the various letter combinations. But if the student has an instantaneous, instinctive, intuitive recognition of all the letters that he or she is reading, all the subsequent stages of learning to read become very easy. The astounding success of the TARA Akshar programme is visible proof. That is why in TARA Akshar, we have come up with a method of teaching this first step of learning letters in a revolutionary way by the use of memory associations embedded in animated movies. After that we reinforce the learning with other memory techniques.
 

In TARA Akshar, the student does not have to memorise anything; rather he/she simply watches the animations and automatically learns the same.

Victor Lyons, Chief Designer of the TARA Akshar Programme, while working with TARAhaat, spent 18 months perfecting the programme by trying it out in villages around Delhi. ‘We sat and watched the students watching the computer. We learnt all sorts of fascinating information about the way people learn.’ TARA Akshar uses a combination of different media tools to attack the problem from as many media angles as possible. Students watch animated cartoon movies featuring the letters of the alphabet, who turn into characters and have adventures with each other. Students also play card games with special cards featuring letters of the alphabet. A hundred minutes like this constitutes one day’s lesson.
 
‘It’s not just the software, it’s the whole administration of the project that is making it a success,’ says Surender Rana, the Chief Project Coordinator for TARA Akshar. ‘We train the instructors on 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 also by ‘Quality Controllers’ who spend weeks appearing at random in different centers to do spot checks on the quality of instructor training.

To ensure effective management of the project, a three-tier system has been devised. The first level of monitoring is done by the Head Office team based at New Delhi. The second level of monitoring is done through Master Trainers who provide the requisite support, passage of information and monitor the implementation process. Finally, the instructors and Quality Controllers implement the programme at the village level.

Presently, the project is focusing on five Hindi-speaking states: Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Haryana. The project is financed by DFID (Department for International Development), the British Government’s development arm and is implemented under the Poorest Areas Civil Society (PACS) programme currently being implemented in the six states of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Chattisgarh and Maharashtra. Development Alternatives and Pricewaterhouse Coopers are management consultants to the PACS programme.
 
Programme Impact

Anecdotal evidence from our 24,000+ graduates shows a dramatic increase in self esteem and consequent improvement in intra-family dynamics. Moreover, more and more new literates are coming forward and demanding comprehensive reading material. In most centres, reading clubs have been organised voluntarily by their respective Sarpanch/CSO, where reading material is also being provided.

Support in terms of room for the building space for the centre, generator and extra reading material are being provided by the Panchayats / Pradhans. There is a long waiting list of learners in most centres.
 
TARA Akshar program has drawn overwhelming media coverage, both print and electronic, not only in India but also abroad. Besides this, TARA Akshar program has been covered widely by Rediff and Business Standard. For more information visit:
www.TARA Akshar.com  q 

Col. M S Ahluwalia
msahluwalia@tarahaat.com

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