Read India: Padikkum Bharatham
When can the Rural Children of India say “we too can read”?? Is this only a dream or can it be realized??
Pratham-India has been conducting a survey called ASER for the last two years, preparing an Annual Status of Education Report at the national level. The report is generated after making a sample survey to analyze the current education level of the children. The ASER 2006 reveals that at the national level, quality education reaches only about 66% of the children and at the State level of Tamilnadu the figure is as low as 48 per cent. Also, of the 30 States of India, Tamilnadu stands one among the bottom five.
As a follow up of this, Pratham has launched an ambitious project named - READ INDIA. Goal of the project being all the children in rural and urban India in the age group of 6 to 11 should read in their mother tongue fluently without mistake and with comprehension and do simple arithmetic by March of 2009.
Vidyarambam is executing the project in 3 districts of Tamilnadu - Thanjavur, Tirunelveli and Thoothukudi as pilot run. A block level approach has been taken for efficiency reasons. Each block in a district has been assigned a block-coordinator who would be coordinating the activities of the project in that block. For every ten villages in the block, a cluster monitor has been appointed who would be responsible for the successful execution of the project in the cluster assigned to him/her.
As step one, the cluster monitors approach the Panchayat Leader/s in their villages and seek their cooperation to explain the purpose of the READ-INDIA project to the people, identify two volunteers who come forward to teach the children of their village and provide them with sufficient information to begin their work.
The volunteers then take the responsibility of enlisting all the children of that village, conduct pre-test for each child to identify the ones with low level basic learning skill and would need the support.
In parallel, the project management team is putting together the project plans, preparing TLM, conducting training sessions to the coordinators, monitors and volunteers. Wherever the training for the volunteers is complete, the TLM is being handed over to them and the classes are begun in their respective villages.
Training and teaching materials are provided to the volunteers free of cost.
Ground work for the project began by the middle of December 2006 and the project is operative in all the villages of the 3 districts from the middle of February 2007. About 6025 villages have been covered and more than 170,000 students have been reached. About 9150 volunteers are striving to raise the skill level of the students.
The post tests are being conducted at all centers and the result is about 82 to 87% of the students have reached the goals of the READ INDIA campaign - READ fluently and DO ARITHMETIC.