Right to Read programme on a roll in India, Africa and Central America

An ambitious and technology driven programme to help government school students read, write and speak English has been rolled out in India with impressive speed and results

The year was 2009. Venkat Srinivasan, a Boston-based computer scientist, serial entrepreneur and an innovator in the area of cognitive sciences and artificial intelligence noticed a big gap. He had excellent Indian engineers in his start-ups but almost all of them were not very conversant with English. This prevented them from interacting directly with their clients across the United States. The inability to speaking and write fluently in English was hampering their progress.
 
Srinivasan tried sending his engineers to popular brick and mortar English speaking schools, courses of various kinds but found nothing really worked. That’s when Srinivasan developed a new technology for the purpose of learning the English language: the Writing Assistant.
 
In 2011, fate brought Srinivasan and his technology in contact with former India chairman of American Express Sanjay Gupta. The duo soon realized that the technology developed by Srinivasan could be applied to India to achieve results never seen before and on a scale not imagined before.
 
Over the years – in a career that involved travel all over the globe - Gupta himself noticed two things: India was light years behind other countries in education, literacy and numeracy. Two, one can do real magic with technology. An earlier stint with Motorola had exposed him to what technology and its transformative powers could achieve albeit in a relatively short time frame.
 
Gupta also felt he must direct his efforts towards the public system for a host of reasons. The government school ecosystem is where India has the largest scale, it is where the poorest of India’s children study and unlike the private budget school space, with the public system, there is regulation and framework. “It may not be executed well but it exists”, explains Gupta. The private budget school system is like a wild animal while the government system is more tamed and manageable. Delivery outcomes of both are questionable. “Nowhere on the planet has any country made progress in literacy and numeracy goals without the public system heavily vested in it”, he argues. This, to his mind, was the place to be.
 
Even as these thoughts were going through Gupta’s mind, he came across Srinivasan and understood the power of his technologies. Srinivasan had developed Writing Assistant and been granted a patent in the US for its speech tagger. An idea formed in Gupta’s head. What better way to reach the largest number of Indian children in the shortest time period? Also, government schools did a very poor job of teaching English, if they taught it at all.
 
Shortly afterwards, Gupta with a couple of others including Srinivasan registered a company in the US called the English Helper and started to look for ways to make inroads into India’s vast public school system. Until English Helper began, Gupta had been a strictly “corporate” type. He’d never worked with the government system and 28 states of India sounded a bit daunting but a partnership with the American India foundation gave him a foothold into around 100 schools they were already working with. The Right To Read programme was launched in these schools to begin with using the ReadToMe technology - a multi-sensory software technology that leverages research in cognitive science that acknowledges that multiple sensory inputs are necessary for students to understand material.
 
The programme is designed to bring in minimum change so the school’s existing textbooks are integrated with software and the teacher uses a projector and a computer to teach. There is a multi sensory and interactive experience without any new investment in hardware or new IT infrastructure. The impact in these 100 schools was measured and they found that teacher and student engagement went up substantially.
 
That’s when Gupta felt they could scale up and approached USAID. In 2015, the Right to Read programme was launched with USAID in 4889 schools in eight states covering a total of one million children across Grade 1 to 10. In 2016-17 third party independent assessments in four of these states – West Bengal, Maharashtra, Punjab and Gujarat – showed a 20 per cent improvement in reading abilities across the schools.
 
Once the model was proven to have a reasonable degree of success, it expanded at a rapid pace. By 2018, the footprint reached almost 15000 schools and nearly 3.5 million students. This June, following a highly successful pilot programme in 4000 schools in the state, the government of Maharashtra has approved the implementation of RightToRead in 65,000 schools in the state for two years. For the time being, the project will be run for free – without any support from the Maharashtra government. The English Helper team will find the funds to roll out.
 
On an all India level, the RightToRead Program is presently operational in 300 districts across 28 states and 4 Union Territories of India. Recently, the program has started getting paid mandates and will be expanding to 2,485 schools in designated minority districts of Assam, Sikkim, Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka.

The success of the program has also enabled English Helper to expand to schools  in Africa (Sierra Leone & Nigeria), Asia (Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal & Vietnam) and Central America (Nicaragua, Honduras & Guatemala). In addition, the government of Sri Lanka has recently accorded its approval for implementing RightToRead in all government schools in Sri Lanka. This will enable the program to reach 4.1 million students in 10,000 schools in the country. By the end of this academic year, the programme hopes to cover 100,000 schools in India and the regions it is currently operating in and covering 15 million students.

While this programme targets students who are still in school, what happens to those who are already out of school and need similar assistance? “Millions of youth are already on the job market and facing all the disadvantages that they do when they are not conversant in English”, he argues.

For them a new app called English Bolo has been developed. The unique feature of this app is distance teaching. After every eight self-lessons, the student can book a one-hour lesson with a teacher sitting anywhere. So, a student in Orissa or Jharkhand can find himself face to face with a teacher in Delhi or Mumbai and clear all his doubts in real time.

The first round of funding was raised through Omidyar Networks but a large number of expatriates through a wide network of Indian origin individuals, many of whom are based in the US have donated and contributed towards the effort. A total of US $ 8 million has been raised so far.

Meanwhile back in Boston, Srinivasan – the serial innovator - is working on a host of new technologies including Literary Assistant and Gyan, the details of which he shares with this writer. Many of these he hopes will help India and Indians as well as others wanting to learn across the globe.

Also shared by the founders is a short and heartwarming video of three shy young girls in a government school in Sierra Leone who thank the programme and bless it aplenty for their fluency in English, something their parents and many peers lack. Interested readers can click and watch (add link to video) as seeing is usually believing.