Twenty six years in the making, Billion Readers (BIRD) is an initiative of The Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIM-A) and PlanetRead that aims to ensure daily and lifelong reading practice for a billion people in India. This seemingly impossible goal is made possible through Same Language Subtitling (SLS), BIRD’s core innovation. Essentially, SLS is the idea of adding subtitles on mainstream video-based entertainment in the ‘same’ language as the audio to serve a vision: Every Indian, a fluent reader.
Currently, India’s literacy rate is around 80 percent but the quality of literacy is low. Studies have found that over half the “literates” cannot read simple texts, much less a newspaper. Children fall behind in reading from the early grades and weak skills fray further in life due to a lack of reading practice. India is estimated to have 600 million weak readers, in addition to 250 million non-readers. Six out of 10 weak and non-readers are girls & women.
Most households in India have few books or reading material to enjoy but have a TV. With SLS, switching on the TV will mean switching on reading. More than a billion TV viewers in India watch, on average, four hours of TV every day. SLS on entertainment content will give them two+ hours of daily reading practice. That is the equivalent of 14,000 words seen and read per day, or a book read every five days, or 4000 books over 60 years. A lifetime of daily reading with SLS costs less than half a dollar per weak reader.
After two decades of evidence-based-policymaking, SLS is now a part of India’s Accessibility Standards. BIRD and our partners are working with the government, private TV networks, and streaming platforms to ensure that every Indian remains on a path to lifelong reading practice and progress... unless they stop watching a screen. By prioritizing girls and women in implementation, BIRD is on course to unlock unimaginable possibilities of dignity, skill, and empowerment.
The Library of Congress (LoC) awarded PlanetRead its inaugural International Prize for Literacy, in 2013. BIRD and PlanetRead are immensely grateful to LoC for recognizing the potential of SLS a decade back. See here or Michael Trucano’s blog.
More on BIRD at www.billionreaders.org.
@planetread #subtitles #literacy #girlseducation
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This is incredible! Congratulations on an outstanding achievement to you and your team, 
Brij Kothari
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Thank you very much for your kind words and support of our work, Judith!
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