TARA Akshar -
Towards Literacy in 35 Days
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 and write fluently and
coherently in 35 days. All it needs is a computer and a willing
instructor who has undergone one week’s training.
TARA Akshar has achieved
unprecedented success in barely two years from its rollout. The success
of the programme can be judged from the fact that by June 2009, over
54,000 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 has achieved an average success
rate of 97 per cent and the dropout rate is less than 1 per cent.
TARA Akshar 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 and Swiss Governments, in association with Microsoft, TARAhaat
and Seva Mandir.
Background
The economic boom in India has
ensured a lavish life to some people. But even after 62 years of
independence, India is home to the largest number of illiterates on
earth. A whopping 400 million people still cannot read and write the
language they speak. Illiteracy 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 among the
neo-literates.
Literacy 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 the
society, and leads to gender equity. Without any concerted action,
illiteracy can impede growth and development of any country.
Valiant attempts have been made
to increase the literacy level in India but the number of illiterates in
the country is still enormous. Over one-third of Indians above the age
of seven are illiterate (World Bank Development Policy Review).
Facts About Illiteracy
• According to the UNESCO,
there are about 1 billion non-literate adults in the world1
• 98 per cent of the illiterate
population lives in the developing countries2
• 34 per cent of the illiterate
population in the world lives in India3
Stumbling Blocks
Illiteracy can be attributed
partly to the ever-growing population and partly to the failure of the
governments’ literacy programmes. Currently, in India, it takes between
6 months to 2 years to teach people to read and write. The poor and the
marginalised, who constitute the majority of the illiterates in India,
either fail to muster the courage to enroll into a literacy programme,
or lose steam midway and drop out because of the staggering amount of
time and effort it takes to become literate through conventional
methods. Most of the illiterates, especially adults, work as wage
labourers, domestic household workers and farm labourers. 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 doorstep of the poor and marginalised in a short time
and at an affordable cost.
TARA Akshar: The New Way of Learning
TARA Akshar trains the students
to recognise the sound of the letter. It is followed by training them in
syllables, and then letting them loose on words and sentences. The
conventional wisdom is that the hardest part of learning is to recognise
the combination of letters. 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 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 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, students do not
have to memorise anything; rather, he or she simply watches and plays
which, in turn, takes care of the memorising.

TARA Akshar is a Flash-based
software that has been developed in-house by TARAhaat. The
software uses morphing and memory techniques to teach completely
illiterate people to learn, read and write Hindi (Devanagri) in 35 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 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, who turn into characters that 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. Students are required to attend one lesson
a day, 6 days a week, until the 35 days are up.
A Symbiotic Approach
A three-tier system has been
devised. It is a computer-based model of delivery and involves
participation of the Civil Society Organisations (CSOs), Community Based
Organisations (CBOs), and Self Help Groups (SHGs). The first level of
monitoring is done by the Head Office team based in New Delhi. The
second level of monitoring is through Master Trainers, who provide the
requisite support, passage of information and monitor the implementation
processes. Finally, instructors and Quality Controllers implement the
programme at the village level.
At present, TARA Akshar is
being offered through TARA Akshar centres located in small villages. As
people become literate, they aspire for higher education and employable
skills. TARA Akshar centres each have a laptop computer and an
instructor.
‘It’s not just the software;
it’s 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 also Quality Controllers, who spend their weeks appearing at random,
at different centres to carry out spot checks on the quality of
instructor training.
What Next?
TARA Akshar has provided
literacy to over 54,000 women and girls, 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:
• A financial literacy module
is being developed to enable TARA Akshar learners to do mathematical
calculations
• The customisation of
multimedia-based Enterprise Development Module for neo-literates is
being done. It will help train TARA Akshar learners, especially SHG
members on the entrepreneurship skills and, thus, translate their
literacy into income generation
Conclusion
Anecdotal evidence from our
54,000 plus graduates shows a dramatic increase in self-esteem and
consequent improvement in intra-family dynamics. More and more new
literates are coming forward and demanding more reading material. In
most centres, reading clubs have been organised voluntarily by the
respective Sarpanch or CSO, who provide the reading material. The
Panchayats or Pradhans support this endeavour by providing a room for
the centre’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 54,000 women have become literate in two 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 and writing skills but 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 and
write. The programme has a 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 MS Ahluwalia
msahluwalia@tarahaat.com
Sources
1,2http://www.sil.org/literacy/LitFacts.htm
3http:/timesofindia.indiatimes. com/articleshow/916814.cms 2003)
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