Read India Movement

What is "Read India"?
It is a people's initiative led by Pratham to ensure improvement in basic learning in reading-comprehension, writing, and arithmetic. It is not only about reading.

Read India focuses on Std I-II at the alphabets/words and numbers/place value level and on Std III-V at the fluent reading, and solving arithmetic problems. Higher Std are not excluded, but are not the primary focus.

Read India will set a time-table so that by March 2009, the goals of the campaign will be achieved. The end date of the campaign is not negotiable but phases are.

Read India is a two year phased campaign to improve quality of learning of basic skills that will simultaneously initiate action on the ground and persuade governments to take up the program statewide, even if phased.
A phased program will be chalked out in each state by a state-level group led by Pratham or a Pratham affiliate.

Read India will build partnerships with willing governments. Where governments are not able to serve as a formal partner, the Read India campaign will directly work with volunteers in every village and urban slum communities as per a phased plan to bring about the change.

Why "Read India"?
The objective of Read India is to impact learning of basic 3R's among children across India. There will be no shift of focus from this. This is the Cause.

Yet, we know that when a massive effort is undertaken with teachers, officers, volunteers, panchayat, VEC, and mothers involved, the act of changing the learning levels positively affects everyone involved. This leads to a motivation and a desire to bring about additional change.

This campaign will change the attitude that "these children" cannot learn by showing that they do make rapid progress in a short time on a massive scale, help in catalyzing a larger change inside the school system although that is not a primary design objective and create the springboard to the next level of learning achievement beyond basic 3 R's. The next level of achievement beyond the 3 R's may be taken up in districts or states where the goals of Read India have been largely reached.

How "Read India"?
The campaign has four major components:
Introduction of "learning to read" (and arithmetic) activities in all schools. Simple interventions include a "reading period" aimed at improving fluency in reading to teaching the use of alphabet and "barakhadi" (or equivalent) charts as a simple tool.
Creating and supplying appropriate reading and learning materials to teachers, volunteers. The materials will be graded in terms of level of difficulty from alphabets, words (simple and difficult) to simple paragraphs, difficult (to read, to comprehend) texts, and simplified narration of some textbook lessons.
Involving young volunteers who will in turn ensure that mothers are involved in their children's learning. It may become possible to have mother literacy classes if the government agrees to link mother literacy with children's learning
Evaluation of the project by the implementing network and also an external agency appointed for the purpose.

Program Phasing

Overall program phases: there will be two big annual phases in the program.

The summer program will aim either at a whole state or restricted number of districts to target the children entering Std I and Std II to ensure that they learn at least alphabets and numbers. Others in this category in std III-V may be included too.

The program during the academic year will focus more on children in Std III-V. The primary objective of the academic year campaign will be to make fluent readers and math doers out of those who are word and paragraph readers or only know numbers but not subtraction or division. These children make up nearly 40% of all children. By std III, the percentage of children who cannot even read alphabets is normally down to about 10% or less. These children should not be left out of the program entirely but all energies should not be focused on them. Maximizing fluent readers with minimum effort will also create an atmosphere within which the children who only know alphabets also will begin to learn more.

• Geographical phases
  Geographical phases will be determined by availability of human resources and financial resources at the moment. Nationally, the following broad numbers should hold:
• Jan 07- Apr 07: About 120 districts.
  
• May- Jul 07 : About 300 new districts and metros, some state capitals - Std I- II campaign
  
• Academic year 07-08: 300 new (cumulative 400) districts
  
• May- Jul 08 : About 200 new districts (cumulative 500) and all million plus cities std I-II
  
• Academic year 08-09 : 200 new districts Std III-V and all million plus cities. Mopping up for all 600 districts.
  
• For a state with say 25 districts, the districts can be covered in 2 or 3 phases as the state leadership and government feel comfortable. In UP, where there are 70 odd districts, the phasing is likely to be 20 (currently running), 20, and 30. Thus the first 20 districts will be covered up to May as per the MoU. Over summer, there could be a campaign to teach Std I and II children alphabet, numbers, and word reading at least. From Jul- Oct the next 20 districts followed by another phase of 30 districts in the Dec- March period. Alternatively, UP could decide to complete the task in 40 districts in 2007-08 and leave the other 30 districts to be taken up in 2008-09. If the government decides to take up all 70 districts at one go, they may have to decide how best to optimize human resources. In smaller states with 15 districts or so, although the task seems simpler, the same choices of phasing apply.
• It is quite possible that the 4 month district campaign will fail to deliver results for one reason or another. In which case, completing the task is more important than just moving to another district. Of course, the local conditions will decide the next step in case of failure to achieve major change.

Execution

• In every village, there will be one village volunteer who will work with about 50 children who need help as per the goals set. This means that sets of Teaching Learning Materials (TLM) to be given to each village will depend upon the number of volunteers, which will be estimated from the census data.
  
  
• For the program, each volunteer/ teacher will have a chart of names of children at different levels in reading and math which can be updated every month. We will provide a card to each volunteer/ teacher in the TLM set we give.
  
  
• The volunteers may want to adopt a "class" mode, but as we have learnt from recent experiences, it is much more important to take the message home to the mother along with some learning materials, which the child can take home from a pool of materials (mini-library). Unless this is done, reaching the last child and drawing the last child into the program is difficult.
  
  
• Teacher/ volunteer training should be short - no more than one or two days and should be preferably held no higher than at the block level. Cluster-level orientation may be preferred as it involves less cost and may allow a demonstration in a school or a village which is much more effective than in a "training place".
  
  
• The actual campaign period in each district should not exceed 4 months at a time. Longer campaigns tend to be less efficient and more expensive. Unless districts in a state are phased, costs will run quite high.
  
  
• It has been observed in Pratham's own classes and in the large scale campaigns that we have undertaken with different governments, a three-four month campaign consistently pushes about 60-80% of the low level reading children (words and paragraphs) into the fluent reading category. About 80% of the children who cannot read at all ("nothing") move into either the letter or word categories. Therefore, it is important to plan a follow up for the next three-four months to greatly enhance the number of children who can at least read letters or words and further tip the scales in favor of fluent reading through low-intensity, low-monitoring interventions. Experience shows that teachers and volunteers are enthused by their success and feel comfortable in carrying this forward without much pushing needed.
  
  
• The four month campaign will leave behind the above low intensity follow up program. That is, the training-monitoring manpower requirement below district level will be negligible but village volunteers will continue to follow up. The best way would be to ask the schools (or, village volunteers if schools are not partners), to continue with a "reading period" every day when children read aloud, read to themselves, and talk bout what they have read.