If an intelligent space alien came to planet Earth, intent on making a dispassionate report on the major issues in the lives of human beings, I don’t think he would spend much time on the subjects of terrorism, caste, scams, party politics or the other obsessions of the headline writers. Far more likely in painting the big picture would be to say that just like a game of cricket, human beingness is a game of two halves – the two genders. But unlike cricket, the two halves don’t play by the same rules. Hundreds of millions of men treat women (and girls) appallingly.

This isn’t just a phenomenon in the well-known basket cases of Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. In the USA, for example, one in four women has suffered rape or attempted rape. Worldwide, one in five children has been sexually abused.

What does this have to do with literacy? Will a literate women no longer suffer abuse? The short answer is no, but it is an essential first step. To fully empower a woman, you have to make her financially independent so that she is free to choose her life. To make her financially independent, she needs to have a job, whether employed or self-employed. To have a job, she needs vocational training. To get vocational training she needs to be able to study. Yes, there are some skills that can be imparted without reading material, but let’s make things easier on ourselves, let’s make people literate so they can get trained so they can get jobs.

This is not a problem confined to rural India. One of the biggest fears, obsessions even, in the West is the crime rate. In both the US and the USA, the level of illiteracy amongst criminals is 40 per cent. Half of all criminals in the UK have a reading age below 11. Nobody has proved causally that illiteracy causes criminality, but it’s obvious that an illiterate in today’s highly educated Western society may well choose to become a criminal in order to survive.

So how do we make India literate? Step one is to confront the real problem. The official government statistics say that one-third of India is illiterate. In the real world, that number is TWO-THIRDS. This is borne out by research by UNESCO.

The second step is to create a literacy programme. I and my colleagues in Development Alternatives spent two years (2005-2007) building one. Called TARA Akshar, it was designed from the outset to work for illiterate adults, as well as for those with mild learning disorders. Our results show that we have succeeded. Almost 60,000 women, all of whom were completely illiterate, and most of whom had never ever been to school, have graduated our programme and can now read and write.

Why have we been so successful where so many other programs have struggled with immense failure rates and massive drop-out rates? It is because we discovered that the prime essential for reading is complete mastery of letter recognition. Because we focussed on a psychology background rather than an educational one, we plied the program with numerous memory techniques so that students didn’t have to strain their minds to remember what letter made what sound. Instead, they just sat back and watched a movie in which every letter of the alphabet is a character or prop in a story. The story is told in cartoon format over several episodes. The students arrive every day to watch the next episode, where they will learn another half dozen letters without any strain whatsoever.

The technical term for this is Animated Laubach technique. But you don’t have to remember that, just be impressed that it works! In 12 days at 100 minutes per day, our completely illiterate students, aged from 8 to 80, learn every single letter of the Hindi alphabet to a 100 per cent pass rate. Our combined drop-out/failure rate is well under 5 per cent. It is probably the most effective early reading programme in the world.

As well as reading, the students also learn to write, and then they go on to learn numeracy. There are more techniques than just animation. We use about a dozen different memory techniques to reinforce the learning and to help the students with syllables, followed by words and then sentences. We do this with computer software along with special playing cards and flash cards. After all, you need to do something when the electricity has stopped for the day and the computer has become as much use as a cricket match with no balls.

It’s not just the content of the programme that is the key to its success. When we first devised the programme, we were faced with the problem of how to administer it across hundreds of villages in northern India, with bad roads, erratic electricity supply, inadequate telephone system, stuttering internet, and a complete lack of good instructors.

What we came up with has proved to be of equal importance to our pedagogic innovations. The organisational planning was done by me, using my American business experience, and Colonel MS Ahluwalia, our Chief Project Manager. The Colonel had extensive experience of large-scale training in the Indian Army. What we came up with was a quality control system using independent inspections and reporting that has proven to work superbly well.

The third important factor in our success has been the quality of instructor training. Even if we wanted to, going out and recruiting hundreds of quality teachers in rural areas is just not an option. We want instructors who we could train from scratch – a clean slate – not people loaded with the baggage and prejudices of century old training methods. So we look for high school graduates in the vicinity of our centres, and we bring them to the state capital for a one-week training course, where we train them thoroughly. We train them in computers, we train them in rapid learning techniques, we train them in the TARA Akshar programme, and we train them in running a course. At the same time, we train the best instructors to become master trainers so we can scale up, and we train other instructors to become quality controllers. These people are essential. They travel from village to village doing spot inspections on the classes and provide us with an essential independent view on the class.

So, once we have graduated our students, what happens next? Not what you’d expect. The most obvious effect is the pride the women have in their accomplishment. Please don’t think that this is a minor issue. At the heart of the whole concept of empowerment is pride in what one is, what one does and what one has. And for an illiterate woman in a rural Indian community, a certificate that says YOU ARE LITERATE is truly something to be proud of.

And being literate, they can now go on and do vocational training. Or just read bus signs. Or just read and write letters to relatives in other villages. Or fill in a government form so that they can get benefits. It’s these small things that change the quality of life when one lives in a village.

Some of our graduates really grab the bull by the horns and get themselves elected as village heads, or join the village management committees.

But the most important feature of all is that the balance of power in the family has changed. The most common benefit we hear is ‘My husband now respects me. My opinion counts.’ This is true empowerment.

In our next major literacy project, we are going to be doing two innovative activities. Firstly, there will be a research project running in parallel, designed by leading researchers at universities in the UK and the USA, which will not only record the effectiveness of Tara Akshar and its benefits, but also highlight the effective ways of working with local stakeholders and government officials so as to maximise the impact of the programme.