Dated April 6, 2000
Business Standard, Pune

Tata Consultancy Services has embarked on an experimental social project that promises to reduce the widespread illiteracy in the country by using information technology and 'reverse' form of education to educate the rural poor.

Instead of teaching the rural illiterate the alphabets first, the new concept uses the reverse approach - teaching them to read the most widely-used vocabulary first.

Brainchild of F.C. Kohli, Deputy Chairman of Tata Consultancy Services, the pilot education project is being implemented in Andhra Pradesh and holds good promise for a country which is facing a widening gap between the literate and the illiterate.

"Five villages are being initially covered in Andhra Pradesh where 100 volunteers are involved in teaching rural people to identify 300 to 500 words," Kohli said explaining TCS's approach to educating the rural poor in the shortest possible time.

Using the latest technology, the TCS team has been able to identify 300 to 500 words in Telugu that are important for an illiterate person to get into reading. With this brief vocabulary study, Kohli points out, a person will be able to read three-fourth of a newspaper without much difficulty.

This reverse process of education hopes that once the illiterate segment of the population gets to know to read the most important and the most used vocabulary, the need to study the alphabet will follow naturally. Although the new idea of educating the rural poor was conceptualized a year ago, the actual implementation started in Andhra Pradesh only five weeks back.

"There are 90 per cent chances that our experiment will succeed and 10 per cent chances that it might not succeed," Kohli said.

The TCS team in Andhra Pradesh is working on newer tools to enable it to reach more people like the setting up of servers and wireless loops to connect to distant villages.

"In the last seven years, India's illiteracy has been reduced by 10 per cent and, at the current pace, we will need 35 years to reach 95 per cent literacy (from the current 60 per cent)," he said underlining the need to hasten the process of literacy programs in India where over 40 per cent of the population are still illiterate.

Kohli said the new concept of education can be extended to several other languages and that Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), which is working on translating software to translate one language into another, could help this informal education purpose too.

If the current experiment of education in Andhra Pradesh is successful, Kohli said India can rid-off 90 per cent of illiteracy in 5 years.

By Avertino Miranda