For Dr Brij Kothari, the ‘eureka!’ moment came while watching a Spanish film back in 1996. The 58-year-old academic social entrepreneur wondered how beneficial it would be for reading literacy in India if Bollywood films, too, had subtitles in Hindi. 

That’s how BIRD, or the Billion Readers initiative, was conceived. 

Soon after this incident, Dr Kothari joined the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA), and dove deep into research on the idea of Same Language Subtitling, a term he coined himself. SLS, he explains, is subtitling audio-visual content in the ‘same’ language as the audio. What you hear is what you read.

“The idea behind BIRD is that SLS of content on mainstream television and streaming platforms will promote reading literacy to a billion Indians who have access to television,” explains Dr Kothari, who is currently serving as adjunct professor at IIMA. 

BIRD, a collaboration of IIMA and Dr Kothari’s non-profit PlanetRead, was recently awarded a prestigious ‘system change’ grant from the global philanthropic collaborative Co-Impact. It was among the 34 initiatives across Africa, Asia and South America to be given the grant to help make systems more just and inclusive. 

On receipt of the grant the former director of IIMA, Prof Errol D’Souza, said, “Our institute has nurtured the SLS innovation from its very beginning and over the next five years we aim to scale it nationally in partnership with the government, private sector, civil society and other institutions.”

Despite a literacy rate of nearly 80 percent in India, studies have found that over half the “literates” cannot read simple texts, much less a newspaper. ASER (Annual Status of Education Report) has, year after year, found that half the rural children in class 5 cannot read a class 2 level text.

“This is a serious problem and there are multiple reasons. When a child joins school, the home language may differ from the school language. The quality of teaching in schools leaves much to be desired,” explains Dr Kothari. 

He continues, “The problem of intermittent schooling is another problem. Out of 200 days of schooling, children in rural areas may attend only 100-125 days. Many children drop out of school in class 5, and more in class 8. After that there is no opportunity for constant reading practise for them, as they have little exposure to print material. Weak readers read even less, compounding the problem.” 

The premise behind the BIRD initiative is that the average Indian will watch around four hours of TV every day, for 70-odd years. If the TV content has SLS, when the TV is switched on automatically, reading is switched on. India is estimated to have 600 million weak readers, in addition to 250........

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