Over 44,000 rural women made literate with TARA Akshar till April 2008

 TARA Akshar, India’s fastest literacy programme, has made over 44,000 rural women literate till date since April last year who have passed the examination at a success rate of 98%.

TARA Akshar is a computer-based functional literacy programme that teaches completely illiterate people to read and write Hindi (Devanagri) in just 4 weeks. It was invented and developed by Victor Lyons, Product Manager and the TARAhaat team. TARAhaat is an ICT affiliate of Development Alternatives and the literacy programme was rolled out under the Poorest Areas Civil Society Programme of DA in 2007.

Literacy is the cornerstone of socio-economic empowerment. Despite various efforts by the Government and NGOs to spread literacy, India is still home to around 400 million illiterate people, most of them women. The major limitation of existing literacy programmes is that either they are ineffective or too long in duration. This is where TARA Akshar stands out.

This revolutionary programme teaches illiterates to read and write in a remarkably short amount of time. Today, it is running successfully from 291 centres across the states of Delhi, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh. The programme has the lowest dropout rate of any literacy course for Hindi – 1%.

Students attend classes of 100 minutes a day held every day for six days a week. The first 18 days are spent inculcating the sounds of letters and letter groups by the use of advanced memory techniques on a laptop. The next 12 days are spent enhancing the learners’ ability to read words and sentences. Writing is taught throughout the programme. On the 30th day of the programme, a written comprehension test is given to the students. The passing marks requirement is 100%.

The student is scientifically trained to instantly recognise sound of letters first, without hesitation, followed by combined letters (syllables), before finally letting him/her loose on words and sentences. The project’s goal is to teach the 60+ letters of the Hindi alphabet to students, who had never studied anything before, in 6 days only.

The TARA Akshar literacy programme is a potent mixture of memory assocations embedded in animated movies, with strong learning reinforcements using rapid-fire video gaming techniques.

The student does not have to TRY to memorise anything, rather he/she simply watches and plays and the memorising looks after itself.

For more details on TARA Akshar, visit www.taraaskshar.com