Read India

Pratham’s Read India campaign works with governments and communities to improve the quality of education in public schools and to create an environment conducive to learning at home. One fundamental insight underlies this campaign: Over 93% of children are enrolled in schools, yet nearly half are illiterate even in grade 5. Read India aims to teach every child in India of ages 6-14 years how to read, write, and do basic math by end 2009. The campaign will cover 60 million children across all 603 districts in India.

Central to Read India are Pratham’s accelerated learning techniques, which are proven to teach a child how to read, write, and do basic math in 2 months. Pilot projects in the states of Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh have confirmed that these results are replicable on a large scale.

Read India has four components:
1. Introduce activities aimed at teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic in all schools
2. Train schoolteachers and create and supply reading and learning materials to them
3. Involve young volunteers from the community and mothers
4. Evaluate the project both internally and through external agencies

Impact so far

Read India has achieved wide coverage across India.  Key achievements in the first year of the campaign include:
· The rollout has reached over 350,000 villages in 388 districts and 19 states.
· We have trained over 877,000 primary school teachers and 376,000 volunteers
· We have formal or informal partnerships with 15 state governments  
· We have reached over 21 million children 
· The Annual Survey of Education Report 2007, a national survey of child literacy, shows that reading fluency has improved across grade levels over the period 2006 to 2007