Education India Project #593

Literacy for a Billion in India!

by PlanetRead

Project Report | Aug 15, 2026
From India's Archives to a Billion Readers

By Aditi Sharma | Communications Manager

Actor Priyanka Bose at our 50th StarDost episode

From India’s Archives to a Billion Readers

Greetings to all, and hope everyone has had a wonderful quarter!

The last few months have been an exciting period of growth for Billion Readers. We’ve been expanding not just the reach of our content, but also the team and partnerships that make our work possible. From taking SLS deeper into India’s public media network to growing StarDost and bringing our anthem to more languages, there has been a lot happening across the initiative.

Taking SLS to WAVES

One of the biggest milestones this quarter has been our partnership with Prasar Bharati.

We are working with Prasar Bharati to bring Same Language Subtitling to up to 1,500 hours of content on WAVES, India’s free OTT platform. This partnership brings together Prasar Bharati’s incredible bank of Indian cinema, culture and television content with the power of SLS — creating an opportunity for audiences to watch, read and connect with the content they love.

BIRD operations have expanded to 8 Doordarshan Kendras across the country, allowing us to work closer to the content, teams and audiences in different regions.

This expansion has also meant a significant growth in our own team. Our BIRD team has tripled in size over the last quarter, bringing together people across different cities and regions as we build the capacity needed to take SLS to scale.

StarDost continues to be one of our strongest content pillars, bringing together familiar voices, engaging stories and SLS to create joyful reading experiences.

This quarter, we reached an important milestone with 50 StarDost episodes released across 8 languages. Each episode gives us another opportunity to bring SLS into everyday viewing and reach audiences through stories and voices they already enjoy.

As we continue to grow StarDost, we’re looking forward to expanding its language and content footprint even further.

Our BIRD anthem has also been making its way across India.

The Hindi version received an incredibly warm response, and we’re now taking the song to more languages and audiences. Marathi, Punjabi and Kannada versions are now out, with Tamil, Telugu and Bengali currently in production.

This quarter has been about building the foundations for scale — strengthening our partnerships, expanding our team across the country and creating more content that can bring SLS into people’s everyday lives.

With WAVES, our growing presence across 8 Doordarshan Kendras, 50 StarDost episodes and the BIRD anthem reaching more languages, we’re entering the next quarter with a bigger team, a wider network and plenty of momentum.

There is still a long way to go, but it’s encouraging to see the idea of a billion readers becoming a little more visible, one screen, one language and one story at a time.

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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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