Literacy for a Billion in India!

As part of development of Anibooks and assessing its impact on reading, PlanetRead is: (a) creating two new stories in animated and subtitled format in Bhili and Santhali each; (b) converting three existing Anibooks (available in major Indian languages) in two tribal languages; and (c) producing master copies of two VCDs with five Anibooks, each VCD comprising of five stories in tribal and regional languages.

PlanetRead’s interventions would result in development of Anibooks in tribal languages, for the first time. The books would be piloted in the field.

A study covering 2,000 children from experimental and control groups would subsequently help assess the impact of Anibooks on reading skills and increasing English vocabulary.

This study revisited more than 13,000 non-readers and early-readers, randomly drawn from five states, to get a snap-shot of their reading skills at the baseline before the SLS intervention (2002), a year later (2003), and more recently (2007).

The data in all three rounds were collected independently by Nielsen's ORG-Centre for Social Research, by administering the same reading and writing measurement tools to the same individuals. The study is further strengthened by the involvement of an independent scholar of statistics, in the analysis. It responds primarily to one key question: Does SLS lead to reading skill improvement among in-school children and out-of-school adults?

It is now conclusive. SLS reinforces the reading skills of children and adults. This is backed by two earlier studies and strongly supported by the present study. Please refer to the document "SLS Impact Study 2007" for a detailed report.

• SLS Impact Study 2007 (PDF)