Education India Project #593

Literacy for a Billion in India!

by PlanetRead

Project Report | Apr 20, 2026
Team Building and Scaling Same Language Subtitling

By Uttara Jadeja | Communications Manager

Ms. Das (Actor) during a Malayalam StarDost shoot

Greetings to all, and hope everyone has had an excellent quarter!

From February 3rd to February 6th 2026, the entire PlanetRead team met on the outskirts of Hyderabad for an offsite. This event marked the first time that everyone from across every city was meeting in person, all together. We had members arriving from Pondicherry, Kerala, Maharashtra, Punjab, Delhi, Arunachal Pradesh, and Karnataka. The gathering, filled with lots of laughter, was tied together by a full day of presentations from each team about ongoing projects. Our main aim was to identify intersections between each team’s work and where we could help each other out. At the end of the retreat, we left rejuvenated with a new sense of purpose and direction.

In addition to signing an MoU with the Maharashtra government, PlanetRead has also begun work with Prasar Bharati at the AIR campus in Delhi to subtitle 1500 hours of content for their streaming platform, WAVES.

So far, 2026 has been an exceptional quarter for Billion Readers in terms of scaling our social media and reach across all platforms (Instagram, Facebook, X, YouTube). In our last report, we mentioned that our aim was to amplify the reach and understanding of our core solution, Same Language Subtitles (SLS).

As of April 2026, we have reached or exceeded those goals. Our YouTube channel now has over 130,000 subscribers, surpassing our March 2026 projection of 100K. In March alone, we achieved 4.88 million combined views across channels.

As one of our key pillars, the StarDost series has been pivotal in helping us establish this presence. StarDost brings together the power of celebrity with the love of stories and reading by integrating SLS. In 2025, we produced around 40 episodes in 7 languages; this year, we target 12 languages and at least 50 episodes, prioritising Marathi, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, and Telugu.

Visibility builds credibility for our work, and our growth advances our mission to deliver SLS to millions of screens and to foster a nation of a billion readers.

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Dec 18, 2025
Scaling SLS through the StarDost series

By Uttara Jadeja | Communications Manager

StarDost Celebrities Collage

Hello to all, and hope everyone is doing well!

Over the past year, Billion Readers (BIRD) has been working to amplify the reach and understanding of its core solution, Same Language Subtitling (SLS), across social platforms. Our pursuit is to make SLS a universal feature in entertainment and education, not only as an accessibility tool but as a powerful enabler of reading ease and literacy for all.

We have established a strong social media presence across Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, X (Twitter), and YouTube. Our efforts have helped us gain 40K YouTube subscribers to date, with other platforms generating millions of views per month. In November, our content reached 2.05 million views on Instagram and 2.64 million on YouTube. Based on our performance thus far, we project crossing 100K subscribers by March 2026.

A key pillar of our outreach is the StarDost series, for which we invite celebrities to read short stories for children. Each video is professionally shot and edited, and integrates SLS, bringing the power of celebrity together with the proven benefits of reading along. So far, 17 celebrated artists have partnered with us, contributing to a growing library of 30 episodes in seven Indian languages. We are building a free, vibrant library of stories for children and their families to tap into.

On LinkedIn, we use long-form posts and Pulse articles to share the thinking and innovation behind SLS for literacy. We explore subjects like the subtitling process, the science behind SLS, our various research topics, and updates from our field initiatives. In one of our recent posts, we spotlighted our Feminist Framework, a guiding tool we use to assess how our media aligns with our values of inclusion, equality, and empowerment.

This online growth serves our main goal - to bring SLS to every new and struggling reader through the content they already love to watch. Over the past year, our digital storytelling has brought our product to millions, for free. With every new viewer, BIRD comes closer to its vision: a nation of fluent readers empowered through Same Language Subtitling.

Links:

Billion Readers- StarDost

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Sep 26, 2025
Indigenous Language Conservation & Promotion using SLS in Arunachal Pradesh - A Progress Report

By Sylvia Mariadassou | Project Manager

Children Watching video with SLS

Dear Friends,

I hope you're all doing well.

The Billion Readers (BIRD) AniBook pilot project, supported by the Department of Indigenous Affairs (DIA), Government of Arunachal Pradesh, and PlanetRead, is working to revitalize six indigenous languages of Arunachal Pradesh: Adi, Idu, Singpho, Tai-Khamti, Kaman, and Tawrã. The project aims to promote indigenous scripts, strengthen cultural identity, and improve reading and language skills, while also developing local talent in narration, translation, music, animation, and coordination.

The project will create six new AniBooks with translations into five other languages, convert five existing AniBooks into six languages, and produce accompanying PDFs and activity sheets. It will also introduce Same Language Subtitling (SLS) in 13 Doordarshan Itanagar TV episodes and build a database of local creative talent. Another key focus is the transcription of folk stories in collaboration with Community-Based Organizations (CBOs) and native speakers, prioritizing endangered tribes such as the Meyor and Sartang.

Progress has been steady, despite challenges such as a limited number of language experts, scarcity of trained animators, tonal and writing complexities, connectivity gaps, and administrative delays. These are being actively addressed through training, stronger community engagement, and revised planning.

By December 2025, we aim to deliver one new Tai-Khamti AniBook with translations into the other five languages and convert five existing AniBooks into six languages. By January 2027, five more original stories will be developed with activity guides and translated into six languages.

Our project facilitators, Mr. and Ms. Deshmuk, along with field coordinators Ms. Chikro and Ms. Mimi, are coordinating closely with language experts from the various tribes to finalize translations and narrations in collaboration with the respective CBOs.

Stay tuned for more updates.

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