Google helps teach, with Bollywood hits

The NASDAQ Stock Market Education Award.
Bruce Aust,Vice President
Brij Kothari, Indian Institute of Management


Google helps teach, with Bollywood hits
C Chitti Pantulu Thursday, January 12, 2006 00:23 IST
http://dnaindia.com/report.asp?NewsID=1007034

HYDERABAD: Believe it or not, watching movie songs for half-an-hour once a week on Doordarshan could improve your reading skills in any vernacular. At least the World Bank and the Google Foundation seem to believe so.

Both the organisations are now involved, though separately, in an exercise to spread reading skills in the Indian hinterland through the novel medium of same language subtitling (SLS), of popular film songs on Doordarshan.

"There are 300 million completely illiterate people in India while there are another 300 to 400 million who are functionally literate but cannot read fluently. Our experiments in SLS have proved that by playing Hindi subtitled Hindi songs for half an hour everyday improve reading skills," said Brij Kothari, a development communication professor at IIM Ahmedabad.
Independent research by the ORG Centre for Social Research, which assessed 10,000 people who were subjected to SLS programming in Gujarat over a three to five year period has shown that results are good, he pointed out.

The idea originated at the time when Kothari watched Spanish films with friends while at the Cornell University. Later, a grant of $250,000 kick-started a novel project that has today germinated into a non-profit company, PlanetRead.org, involved in literacy development across the world.

Further, Google Foundation, the philanthrophic arm of Google, is pumping in an undisclosed amount into the project to take up SLS in10 languages for 10 TV programmes across India. PlanetRead is one among just the four initial commitments that Larry Page and Sergei Brim have made to support projects that address global poverty, energy and environment among others.

PlanetRead's goal is to take the idea internationally, said Kothari, who was at the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas to market the idea to Bollywood stalwarts .
"I want the film industry to pick up the idea and release same language sub-tited songs in its movies. This would address the illiteracy problem to a great extent," said Kothari who, with his 15-strong team, added subtitles to songs out of his studios in Mumbai and Pondicherry. Next on the cards is a studio in Kolkata, he said.