Philip Chacko

A path-breaking project initiated, developed and conducted by Tata Consultancy Services is using computers to help adult illiterates learn the most basic of the three Rs: reading. More remarkable is its potential to lift India's literacy rate in record time

Gauzia Begum Mohammed was feeling like a hummingbird caught in a hurricane. Her husband had just succumbed to cancer, the family's meagre savings had dried up, and her only child was forced to give up schooling. Everyday survival itself had become an issue and Gauzia, a 40-year-old illiterate with no skills, was faced with a future as bleak as the landscape around her village in the Andhra Pradesh outback.

Then came a light at the end of the tunnel. Gauzia's village was included in a path-breaking literacy project initiated by Tata Consultancy Services, Asia's largest software company. The project uses computers, multimedia presentations and printed material to teach uneducated adults the most basic of the three Rs: reading. It took about 40 hours of learning time for Gauzia to become functionally literate, and it marked the beginning of a voyage that would transform her life.

Today, two years later, Gauzia has graduated from doing menial jobs to setting up a small shop in her village. That happened courtesy of a local self-help group and the micro-credit society it spawned. From there came the loan that got Gauzia going as an entrepreneur. The starting point for this change, from penury to sustenance, was the education that Gauzia received.

Modern human history has been, as HG Wells put it, a race between education and catastrophe. Modern India has more than 350 million citizens who are unable to read or write. The human and social consequences of this tragic statistic are not always clearly visible, but the message it bears is clear enough — India cannot dream of a place in the global economic sun while 35 per cent of her people remain illiterate.

It was to help untangle this web of ignorance that TCS initiated a computer-based literacy programme aimed at adults. The group recognised that the age-old problem of illiteracy in India needed a new-age solution that would supplement governmental and other efforts in the field.

The challenge that confronted TCS was daunting, and it began with the scale of the country's illiteracy problem. According to the 2001 census, 34.64 per cent of Indians cannot read or write. A United Nations report published in 1998 states that a third of the world's non-literate adults are Indians. Worsening this sorry situation is an exploding population that swelled by 200 million in the decade after 1991. A huge number of these people will reach adulthood without knowing how to read or write.

TCS's search for a solution focused on the adult segment of India's uneducated mass. The logic was simple: economically and biologically, the 15-35 age group is the most productive portion of any populace. Current government estimates peg the uneducated in this age group at 28 per cent. Lifting these people out of the illiteracy quagmire is the key to any countrywide education programme succeeding.

The idea of a computerised programme to tackle India's illiteracy conundrum was the brainchild of the company's former deputy chairman, Faqir Chand Kohli, one of the prophets of India's software revolution. Kohli believes that information technology allied with innovation can help speed up the spread of literacy in India. He is certain that, if implemented effectively and with conviction, the project can help India become completely literate in a sixth of the 30-odd years it is currently planned for.

The ground realities of India's illiteracy vortex defined the framework that TCS decided on before getting started on the project proper. The guiding points for the programme were:

• Rather than assume India's uneducated people are a burden that has to be carried all the way, use technology to get them on the road to learning by themselves.
• Focus on reading, because that is the fountainhead skill that leads to writing, arithmetic and the rest.
• Hasten the entire procedure to ensure that an uneducated person can be taught to read in about 30-45 hours, since that's about all the time an adult can afford to spare on a continuous basis.
• Target people in the 15-to-30 age group.
  

The computer-based functional literacy (CBFL) programme that TCS has crafted blends the organisation's expertise in the creation of software with exemplary research done by the National Literacy Mission (NLM), established by the Indian government in 1988 to eradicate adult illiteracy in the country. The programme employs animated graphics and a voiceover to explain how individual alphabets combine to give structure and meaning to various words. The courseware uses puppets as the motif in the teaching process, with lessons tailored to fit different languages and even dialects.

The method is implemented through computers, which deliver the lessons ('shows') in multimedia form to the learners. The emphasis is on imbibing words rather than alphabets, and the project addresses thought processes with the objective of teaching these words in as short a time span as possible. Supplementing computers in this process are NLM's reference textbooks.

Each centre under the project has a computer and an instructor, or prerak, as they are called, to conduct a class. A typical class has between 15 and 20 people and is held in the evening hours. In the early days of the programme most of the instructors were retired teachers or people involved with the adult-literacy movement in the state. While the teachers and others continue to help out, many of the classes are now conducted by those who have come through the programme, like Gauzia, who currently teaches three groups of 15 people each.

It's not just the CBFL project's components that are unique; it's also the thinking behind it. Standard adult-literacy projects teach reading, writing and arithmetic. They require trained teachers and classrooms, and anywhere between six months to two years to complete. The TCS programme focuses on reading while drastically reducing the time it takes an uneducated person to achieve the objective.

The project teaches a person to read in a span of 30 to 45 hours spread over 10 to 12 weeks. Because the programme is multimedia-driven, it does not need trained teachers. Those coming through the programme can acquire a 300- to 500-word vocabulary in their own language and dialect. This suffices for everyday requirements, such as reading destination signs on buses, straightforward documents and even newspapers. And it sets these people on the path to acquiring other literacy skills, including writing and arithmetic ability.

Andhra Pradesh was the laboratory for the initial experiment, back in February 2000, of the CBFL programme. This was followed by extended trials before the project was rolled out. The CBFL project is now operational in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, and is growing firm roots in Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal.

The CBFL programme has lifted more than 46,000 people out of illiteracy and promises to deliver the education elixir to many, many more. That's the big picture, but it is in the individual voices that the benefits of the initiative shine through.

"Literacy has opened up a whole new world for me," says Velimela Kalavathy, a 35-year-old resident of Marxist Nagar Colony, a nondescript settlement in Medak district, Andhra Pradesh. "Reading newspapers, signing documents, helping my children with their homework, even boarding the right bus — these were things I couldn't do previously. Now I can do all of this and a lot more. It's amazing."

Velimela Chandramma, 30, saw a computer for the first time when she joined the project; now she takes classes with them. "Becoming literate — it has given me a completely different perspective on life and how to live it," she says. Chandramma took the lead in starting a women's self-help group in her village. This group now undertakes small government contracts in the district, and Chandramma and her partners have seen their incomes multiply.

Introducing the uninitiated to the world of the written word posed difficulties on more than one front. "The first few lessons we produced were painful in terms of the actual structure, content and the technology we used," says Professor Kesav V Nori, executive vice president, TCS, "but they proved to us that the idea would actually work."

The CBFL programme has come a long way since those tentative beginnings. But a lot more needs to be done if the programme has to realise its full potential. "Ultimately it will come down to funding," says Prof Nori. "We have to get a collaboration going with the IT ministries and the education departments. The kind of infrastructure we can ride on is crucial to the greater success of this programme. Neither TCS nor any other Tata company can by itself solve this; it requires the government to step in."

For any democracy to function effectively, and for any people to improve their chances of economic betterment, literacy is an imperative. As a wise man once said, "Education makes people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave." TCS's endeavour with the CBFL project is to help pave the path to that education.

Uploaded in March 2005