Velimela Chandramma gets a big kick from being able to read bus boards. She considers the acquisition of this skill one of the greater achievements of her life, and it’s an education to see why. Chandramma is a 30-something resident of Marxist Nagar Colony, a no-frills settlement of about 2,000 people in Bandalguda village of Medak district in Andhra Pradesh. Till a year ago Chandramma was one of about 350 millions Indians who cannot read or write.

Chandramma’s life took a turn for the better after she became part of a path-breaking project aimed at reducing the number of adult illiterates in the country. Initiated and developed by Tata Consultancy Services, Asia’s largest software enterprise, and operating under the aegis of the Tata Council for Community Initiatives, the programme uses computers, multimedia presentations and flash cards to slash the time it takes, by conventional means, to teach an illiterate person to read.

Today Chandramma does more than just read; she has become a teacher in the project and passes on what she has learnt to groups of 15 to 20 people while using the same methodology that lifted her out of illiteracy. "I have so much more confidence now," she says. "I can go out and meet local officials and other people, I am more aware of the world around me, and I can follow what my children are being taught at school. Before joining the programme I had never seen a computer in my life; now I take classes with these machines."

Called the ‘computer-based functional literacy’ (CBFL) programme, the TCS project employs animated graphics and a voiceover to explain how individual alphabets combine to give structure and meaning to various words. The course has been designed from material developed by the National Literacy Mission, established by the Indian government in 1988 to eradicate adult illiteracy in the country. The Mission’s lessons, outstandingly researched and formulated, use puppets as the motif in the teaching process, and the lessons are tailored to suit different languages and even dialects.

More than the components of the CBFL project, it’s the thinking behind the programme that makes it unique. Standard adult literacy projects teach reading, writing and arithmetic, and they require trained teachers, classrooms, and anywhere between six months to two years to complete. The TCS programme focuses exclusively on reading, while drastically reducing the time it takes for an illiterate person to achieve the objective. By this technique a person can be taught to read within a span of 30 to 45 hours spread over a period of 10 to 12 weeks. Because the programme is multimedia-driven, it does not need trained teachers (Chandramma becoming an instructor illustrates the point).

Using technology to spread literacy
The original idea for a computerised programme to tackle India’s illiteracy conundrum came from Fakir Chand Kohli, TCS’s former deputy chairman and the man widely regarded as the father of India’s software industry. He believed that modern technology could and should be used to speed up the propagation of literacy in India. He reckoned that if this were done effectively the country could be made literate in a much shorter time frame than the 20 to 30 years it is currently planned for.

The intention was not to supplant existing governmental efforts in the field, but to supplement them. The government needs all the help it can get on this front, and a brief look at the gigantic size of the illiteracy challenge India faces explains why. Official statistics say there has been a 13 per cent increase, from 52 per cent to 65 per cent, in the country’s literacy rate between 1991 and 2001. But there’s been a simultaneous increase of 200 million people in India’s population during this period. It is in this context — the increase in the rate of literacy being offset by a burgeoning populace — that Mr Kohli’s emphasis on the speed factor in the programme becomes significant.

The concept that finally emerged was straightforward:

• Rather than assume India’s illiterates 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 illiterate can be taught to read in about 30 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 (they are the most productive, economically and biologically).

Once the framework was in place, the teamwork that TCS is famous for came into play. Professor P. N. Murthy from the TCS office in Hyderabad decided on the course material to be used, and how to use it in actual classroom situations. Telegu was the first of the languages that the programme was readied in, but that was incidental. Professor Keshav V. Nori from the organisation’s Mumbai head office then worked with a group headed by Dr M. V. Ananthkrishnan, who is attached to the TCS facility in Borivli, Mumbai, on developing the computerised module for the project. Following this, Dr Sharada Ganesh and her colleagues at the Hyderabad TCS centre went out and field-tested the programme.

"The first few lessons we produced were painful in terms of the actual structure, content, technology we used," says Mr Nori, "but they proved to us that the idea would actually work." The TCS team made the most of the experience while eliminating the glitches in the system. Dr Ananthkrishnan and his team found a better technology, and Dr Ganesh and her colleagues undertook more field-testing and revisions of the scripts for the lessons, which went through five revisions before being finalised. All of this was voluntary work, done on weekends and at other times while juggling regular workplace responsibilities.

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