>> Anoop Gupta: Welcome, everybody. My name is Anoop Gupta, and I'm
delighted to be the host for today's visiting speaker series. And thank you all for
coming too for this talk. And I know many of you who are in the online world it's
just too easy to click than to walk across the campus. So we welcome all of you
too.
It's a real pleasure to welcome Dr. Rukmini Banerji for this talk. She will talk
about the gift of education, you know, something that all of us who are here
know, on how foundational it has been to each and every one of us and how we
can enable it for, you know, the billions of children who do not have that
opportunity today. She has also been the founder right from the beginning of
many of these programs that I will talk about. So let me talk a little bit about
Pratham and talk about Rukmini.
One of the thing that's been, you know, very exciting to me personally about
Pratham and some angles she will cover, one is about its education and, you
know, as the saying how deeply it has touched me and all of us in our
development. The second pretty unique thing is about the scale at which it has
been able to drive change. Just in the last couple of years they've touched close
to 35 million kids. And the need is so large looking at the scale issue and how
you achieve that, you know, is really important.
It is also, you know, being engineers and geeks at some level it's great to see
how a data driven approach, okay, has driven not only change for the kids but
change at fundamental government policy level, okay, to drive the impact at the
scale and how did, you know, in the part of scaling not only their own efforts but
how they have looked with governments. So it's not only lessons for India in
particular, but I think these are lessons that might be very valuable throughout
the world on how, you know, education can make a difference.
Now, Rukmini herself, you know, she's the director of many of the programs that
Pratham has in the northeast states of India. She's also been the founder and
director of this data gathering effort called ASER in Hindi, you know, but what
stands for the Annual Status of Education Report that they have done for many,
many years that has, you know, driven these foundational changes.
She got her training in economics in India but then was a Rhodes Scholar and
was at Oxford and completed her PhD in University of Chicago. Welcome,
Rukmini, and we look forward to an exciting session.
[applause].
>> Rukmini Banerji: So I'm not sure exactly where to begin. But I guess -- I
thought I'd speak for a little while and then maybe let you ask questions and then
that will be simpler to do. My own interest in school education actually started in
the US. I lived in Chicago for a long time, and this was about 15, almost 20
years ago, when there was a lot of things going on in Chicago on school reform.
And, you know, I came from, you know, a fairly educated family when to
education was important.
We didn't really have to think about why should children go to school in the kinds
of families that I came from. And so living in Chicago, I think a couple of things
really caught my imagination. One was the fact that it seemed like cities like
Chicago at that time, and I think it's probably true even now, were struggling with
very similar problems to what, you know, we are struggling with in India.
And the second part of it was that the much of the work that was happening in
Chicago at the time was very community driven. So there was a need to sort of
have local involvement in, you know, how to improve schools and that without
that, it seemed like things would not really take root.
So I went back to India, and I had my -- you know, my academic training was in
economics and with a particular interest in children. But I would say that I have
the US to thank for really wanting to get involved at the grassroots in education
and also for sort of valuing the local, local nature of how efforts could be made to
improve schools.
A little bit about the history of Pratham, because I think to understand what we do
now, just a little bit of background might be useful. The two founders of Pratham,
one is called Madhav Chavan and the other is Farida Lambay. They are both
Bombay people.
And for -- I see there are a lot of people who look like you why Indians here.
Whether you are or not, I don't know. But Bombay is really where Pratham
started. And Bombay I still consider to be perhaps our only real city.
Everywhere else, if you ask people where are you from, they may live in a city,
but they always say which is the, you know, village or whatever they come from.
Now, both of these people were university professors and were working in the
late '80s, early '90s in adult literacy. There was a big move at that time for adult
education in India and they were key members of a big urban effort. Much of the
adult literacy work in India was happening in rural areas.
And I think it's quite common when you start working with adults at some point to
feel that you have to work with kids. And when you start working with kids at
some point, you feel you have to work with adults. I think it's a -- I mean, it's not
a which I can end and egg, because adults have to come before the kids. But I
think this is a natural process that I've seen in other places.
And they were coming to this conclusion that while they have been doing a lot of
work with the grown ups, especially with the women, they need to start doing
something with kids. And this was a time that there were some very bad Hindu
Muslim riots in Bombay, in the early '90s.
And again, while we in India have had problems like this historically, Bombay
people always felt that they were immune from bad things like this. And the riots
really kind of cut across the city and divided people in a very kind of, you know,
pernicious way.
And both Madhav and Farida, along with many other people in Bombay at that
point felt that there should be something that a city strives to do together, which
is not controversial, which actually builds the foundations back again and brings
people together rather than dividing.
And what they came up with was this idea that every child in school -- should be
in school in Bombay and learning. The well in our every child in school and
learning well has come thereafter. And the idea was that, you know, Bombay is
a big city, was a big city even then. Something like 15 or 16 million people.
And so every child in Bombay was a lot of children. As you all know, Bombay is
also a very, you know -- it's a very crowded city, it's very densely populated and
very large number of people in Bombay come from elsewhere. They are not
local Bombay people.
So integrating families into the mainstream is something that families have to do
if they want to really sort of take root and begin to work in Bombay. And we felt
at that time that every child in school would be something that you can't actually
-- you can't mean -- it's not a debatable thing. You should be in school. And this
would set the foundations for again sort of bringing people together. And people
from all walks of life should actually want this to happen.
And that's how kind of Pratham started. In the initial stages when I joined, I
joined Pratham in '96. We used to work in a couple of municipal wards we call
them, you know, in Bombay. And at that point the idea was that wherever we
work every child in that ward should have access to school.
And one of the ways in which we thought that would be a useful thing to do would
be to provide some preschool facilities very close to where the children lived. An
idea which is not dissimilar to the head start kind of idea in the US where if a
child goes to preschool then the chances of him or her going on to primary
school is much higher than if they didn't go to preschool at all.
And secondly, it's not just that the child going to preschool, a child going to any
kind of program like this actually enables the families to become oriented to what
is needed to go further.
So we felt often that preschool programs that we first started were really as much
for the family as for the kid. And that way once the child enters first grade the
family has a support in the form of the preschool instructor who could enable
them to actually navigate their way through a much bigger system.
And so we started in these few areas. And when I joined Pratham, I remember
we had about 150 sort of community based little preschool centers. And at that
point, we thought this was scale. This idea of scale actually is very interesting.
You know, words like scale and impact mean different things to different people.
It's almost like Hinduism. If you ask any Hindu what is Hinduism, you'll get a
totally different definition.
And so for us at that point it was -- it was scale. And I remember being very
concerned about how do you maintain quality for 150 centers. And how do you
do training appropriately and so on. And we spend a lot of time thinking about
these things.
The model was very simple. Partly because we didn't have money and partly
because felt that if you wanted to really get widespread participation it can't be
complicated. And so the model was that the preschool, and it was a preschool
center, so it had to be very close to where little children could walk.
Because you know, in slum areas you're not going to take your child and put
them in some kind of vehicle and take them to, you know, wherever they needed
to go. So it needed to be very close to the home. Bombay, like New York City or
like other cities in the world, has very high rents. So we clearly couldn't afford to
pay rent to anybody for running these centers.
In retrospect, this was a very good strategy because it meant that people in the
community had to be involved. If you had to find space where 20 little children
could sit, granted that they were little and often quite thin, but you still needed
some space, you still needed this space to be freed up close to where the
children's homes were. And therefore, people had to hunt high and low to find
these kinds of available spaces.
And you know, as is very obvious, if you look for space, you can find it. But you
have to look a little bit out of the box. If the idea is that it's going to be a room
and the room is going to have a playground outside, well you're not going to find
it.
But if you look for spaces where children normally live and people are willing to
create the space, then spaces can be found.
The instructor was a local person because again, she had to be very familiar to
the children. So usually a young woman. Sometimes a young mother herself
who was from the local area. So she was also not a threatening figure, not a
highly skilled teacher. But the idea was if it was a local personal she could be
trained and she could operate right in her own neighborhood.
So this was the essential model. And by '98, we had 3,000 such little centers all
over Bombay. So I find that even though we've done many things subsequently,
this movement from 150 to 3,000 happened almost sort of in spite of ourselves.
And at that point I remember we tried to do an exercise to figure out whether
every child in Bombay had access to preschool. And I won't bore you with the
details but how do you estimate something like this is also quite an interesting
challenge. To figure out, you know, if -- is it true, were we able to provide access
to preschool to any child in Bombay who wanted to go to preschool.
What happened when this vast network was -- a couple of things. One is that as
cool people in Pratham we never planned that -- you know, all of the idea was
that every child in Bombay, the way it happened was that the demand actually
grew from the existing programs on the background.
And so, you know, one preschool teacher would obviously say to her friends and
to her relatives this is what I'm doing. And it was very hard thing to do because
there wasn't much money in it.
I think from Pratham side at that point we used to give them a little stipend of 250
rupees which even at that time you could earn much more by washing dishes in
somebody else's house. So it was just a token amount that Pratham would
actually give the instructors. And everybody was encouraged to take fees from
children if the children were able to pay.
The only criteria was that you couldn't turn anybody away if they couldn't turn
whatever you were asking. And typically every little preschool center would have
their own kind of dynamic about what would be affordable and who could come.
Each of have these I think preschool instructors, as well as the community in
which this was happening, then began to talk to other people, and every week we
would get demands to say I want to start in my own area. And I remember being
in the office where a couple of women came and said that why are you not
starting the preschool program in my area.
So my reaction to that was that I never started it in the other areas anyway, it
was somebody from there who wanted to start it and all we can do is to assist
you by giving you some training and maybe a little bit of materials and sharing
our experiences.
And so literally the whole movement began like this by people seeing a model
that was kind of doable by kind of ordinary people and then actually demanding
that I need to have one in my own area.
And people were told all along that there isn't any money in this. If you want to
do it and you want to sustain it, it really depends on your own enterprise as to
how you can do this. If there is a need in the community, then the community will
support you. And the support may not be in terms of money, the support may be
in terms of space, the support maybe in terms of all sorts of other things.
And that's how kind of the first scaling up so to speak happened.
The other thing that happened was that other needs began to be surfaced
through this network. So with 3,000 we -- the preschool centers we call them bal
vardis [phonetic]. Bal means child and vardi means home.
What it did was that it was almost we had a presence in every slum in Bombay,
and Bombay is almost 50 percent slums. Other needs began to be surfaced
from the families of the children themselves. So here we were dealing with the
three to five year olds. What about the older brothers and sisters who are not
going to school? People may have moved to Bombay. The families have
moved. There's been a discontinuity in their education. And now dealing with a
large school system which requires people work, which requires all kinds of entry
formalities was difficult to do.
And as people began to see that there's some support was possible, these kinds
of needs about what about the out of school children, how can you help them,
and the other was that my child goes to school but I can tell that they are not
really making progress in the way that they should.
So these were two other big, much bigger perhaps than and more complicated
than the preschools that began to come up. And because again because of the
kind of push that we got from people, we had to come up with models ourselves.
So now the trick was that we had two kinds of children. One [inaudible] who had
been left out.
So you could have a 10-year-old who has not been to school ever or went to
school in first grade four years ago or five years ago and has left. How do we get
them into school? Or you could have a child who's already in primary school in
third grade or fourth grade or fifth grade but haven't learned how to read and
write as yet and therefore is what here you call at risk. I mean actually they are
already beyond risk. They're not going to make it. You know that. I don't know
why we call them at risk.
And so how do you really support and help children like this? And it became very
clear to us right, you know, in those early days that there's only one way to help
these kids. You have to somehow accelerate the rate at which they learn. And
without learning the basics and the basics according to us were basic reading
and basic arithmetic, you're not going to be able to go ahead. But if I take a 10
year old and I spend three years building the basics, well, she's missed the boat
already. So for a 10 year old, I have to get her ready as fast as possible to be
able to enter fourth or fifth grade. Only then can I say that she's going to have a
fighting chance to actually, you know, make progress in the system.
If it's only going to be a band aid then, you know, I can just, you know, then that's
a different kind of effort. And so from those early days I think we started working
on how do you really accelerate learning? A lot of people criticize this. A,
because if you're on scale, then quality and quantity must be inversely related.
This is an idea that was prevalent in India at the time. But luckily businesses
have shown that that's not the case. So now people are a little bit more
accepting of the fact that you could have both move together.
But the other was that you can't -- there are certain things which have their own
logic and you can't make things move faster. So if children had to learn to read,
they have to go through certain steps, and those steps take time, and you can't
rush the process. However, if you have 200 million children in the country out of
whom 50 percent can't read, I don't think you have the luxury of saying that we
need to spend time and build these foundations, you know, in the way that is sort
of -- that is traditionally hard. Traditionally what do we see? We see our school
system as built of these bricks. There's a first grade and a second grade and a
third grade and goes on. And this kind of an idea that there's a linear
progression through these grades.
And it's, you know, you enter school at a certain time, which is five or six,
depending on different countries. And then by 10 or 11 you reach a certain
stage. And this is a natural progression that needs to happen.
But if you have large numbers that don't fit into this model, then I think it's up to
the country to come up with different models which can really speed up the
process because there is no question that by a certain age you need to be in a
certain place. You know, that certain place may not all bring you to Microsoft, but
it -- at least there has to be a satisfactory level by the time you are 13 or 14 to be
able to deal with life afterwards.
So this was our journey in kind of trying to figure out not only do you have to deal
with large problems, but also problems that need speed. But it can only be
solved by large numbers of people who are completely ordinary people. So that
the skills and the techniques that we need can't depend on very high levels of
expertise. People always say that technology can help and, you know, I think
technology can help but at that time, you know, you had to come up with
methods that would help kids learn quickly that could be done on scale by
ordinary people. And our own efforts were actually quite frustrating to us. I
remember around 2001 or 2002 we had very large scale programs, we were
working very hard but we weren't making the kind of progress that we wanted to
make. We were helping kids to, you know, kind of move forward, about it not like
the case that I just described, not fast enough to get a 10-year-old into fourth
grade in a matter of, you know, months.
So this led us to say that you know we need to really stop, take a breath, and
come up with some kind of a different methodology for how to do it. And I
thought I would show you a very short clip which is actually from that time which
shows you what kind of change is possible. He said it's very simple, right? It's a
very, very short film. But it shows you the [inaudible].
[music and video played].
>> Rukmini Banerji: So this is -- this is just a, you know, to sort of bring this live
to you that it doesn't take -- it should not take years to get a kid who is already
probably 7 or 8 to be at least reading up to second grade level stuff fluently. And
we find that if you could read at that level fluently, you are able to at least propel
yourself through a lot of the material that you need to be dealing with in school.
You still need a lot of instruction. You need many more things to happen to you.
But this first stage is a bit like riding a bike or learning to swim. There's a clear
step at which I think we all, you know, you recognize this, either from your own
kids or from kids you know. There is a time when you can't read and then there's
a day when you suddenly can read. And that moment as you can see with the
kids as well, it's not just -- it's not just a cognitive think of making this step. But it
does something to your entire personality as well. So kids who can't read, if you
saw the two kids, you know, will be rubbing their nose, they don't look at you in
the eye, the whole body language is different and as soon as you do learn to
read you could hear even in the film the voice becomes stronger, so there's a lot
of -- I think there are a lot of issues that go with the fact that you have actually
taken this step.
For one thing, parents -- I mean everybody likes kids who succeed. So parents
who are seeing kids, they are sending them to school but the kids aren't making
progress adequately often don't blame the school or themselves but blame the
child and say that this thing is not worth investing in because he's -- you know,
it's not going anywhere.
Teachers, especially if you teach in large classrooms, like kids who are above
average because they are less work and they actually give you the satisfaction
of, you know -- as a teacher, they give you the satisfaction that you're actually
making progress.
But I think most of all, the confidence that our children need is the fact that I can
succeed. And there is no better I think indicator to themselves than the fact that
they have suddenly taken this step and it -- you know, it is very obvious that they
-- to themselves that they couldn't do something before and now they can.
So this technique which you know we could talk about later has couple of very
simple steps and for us as we delve the technique, it was very important to figure
out an assessment that would help us. And when we started, it was an
assessment ready to sort out how would we deal with kids of different categories.
So the assessment tool is actually a piece of paper which has letters simple
words, some sentences like couple of sentences and then a slightly longer text.
And the simple sentences are sort of like at first grade level and a slightly longer
text which is wrapped is like what you have to deal with in second grade. We
use this just so that we could categorize the children we have and see that how
many children do I have who can't yet read letters, how many do I have who can
read letters but not words and so on and so forth. So it was a very, very simple
way of actually categorizing children for us to act.
And we found that as soon as we did this, we came up with very simple activities
that would help to move children from one to the other. And we would use this at
the time -- at the time that this was sort of being developed almost everybody in
Pratham, which was several thousand people, all stopped what they were doing,
each took a bunch of 25 children, give ourselves a month to see how much
progress could you make in a month. So you were actually tracking lots of
children very carefully to see why is this particular child getting stuck and what
can be done and so on.
And so the assessment tool actually helped us to organize our own work and
come up with the action that needed to help them to read.
But at the same time we noticed a couple of other things, that this was being
done in a large -- on a large scale both in schools and in communities. Now, you
know, for those of you who have been to India, we are a very -- you know, we are
a very crowded country. Everybody is in everybody's business at all times. So
when you start actually using this in the slum or in the village, people want to
know what are you doing? And so you say, well, I'm trying to figure out where
the children can read.
50 percent of India children who are in elementary schools mothers have not
been to school themselves. So for them going to school is accepted. Everybody
know now in India that it's important to go to school. But what happens thereafter
is not often so clear. So I'm sending my son to school or my daughter to school,
and I can tell it's not quite moving like it should, but what is not moving?
So we found this simple assessment actually helped parents to get involved,
even if they were illiterate, because they were saying this much he should be
able to do. Because this is a really simple thing to read. And so it helped a lot in
sort of raising awareness that this learning business or quality or whatever it is is
not a complicated thing. It is, as you get higher. But at the very basic level, this
is what your kid is expected to do. And it is okay for you to expect that the child
should do it and if the child can't, then we all have to help the child to figure out
what to do.
So we had the technique and as you can see the -- within about 40 days or 60
days, depending on how many working days you have, four children, not from the
babies, I mean for the little ones you can take longer but for kids who are already
at about seven, eight, the acceleration could be quite fast. So within a period of
about two months you could have kids who are reading fluently.
The assessment helped us to track on large scale how much progress can be
made in a short period of time and it helped to share results as well. So after this
stage of doing it ourselves, we now felt that we need to actually infect other
people. And the best set of people to infect is the government system which has,
you know, large resources, big school systems, where a large part of India's, you
know, kids we have out of our 200 million children almost 80 percent still go to
public schools.
So how do we do that? So as in the tape you'd see that the government in
[inaudible] which is a state around Bombay, when we suggested it to them, they
gave us two really backward tribal areas. And they said why don't you go do it
there. Because if it works there, them we'll think about it.
Now, how do you take -- and each of these areas had about 20,000 children. A
block in India is not like a block here. It has about 100 villages. And if you you
think that every village school has about 200 kids, then that's about the size of
the population that we had here.
We had only very few people. We also didn't have the resources to pay people
to go off and do it. We'd have to use the existing teachers. So what we did was
above every set of ten, 12 schools, there's kind of like a supervisor of schools or
teachers. And we took our experiences, at that point it was not a film, but
basically set that what we want to you do is to listen to my story, listen to the
technique I've used, you don't have to agree with it, but if you come like you have
here, if you come to listen to me talk, you have to go back and for 10 days do
what I say. Not for the whole day. Just for an hour or so with kids who are as yet
not able to read.
Ten days later come back and let's see whether you think that kids -- there was a
difference in the kids. We have two people both in the blocks at that time. But to
begin with, we didn't work with all the schools. We worked with the sort of the
school leadership as you will say.
And the fact of the matter is that if you really focus on a problem and really work
at it, you -- even if you don't use the technique that I'm suggesting, as soon as
you focus on the problem and say that this is a problem, I have to try and crack it
and my progress is going to be measured, change begins to happen. At least in
education. Our health may be a different story. And so 15 days later when we
came back, we were also able to see in the meeting out of the 10, 15 people who
were there who were the ones that were more skeptical? So that our team of
one or two people went and visited their schools more often and what worked
with the kids much more. Because the kids are going to make progress. We
knew that. It's just a question of motivating the adults to believe that the progress
can happen.
15 days later when the meeting happened, at least 70 percent of the people said
I see a change in my children. At this stage then they were ready and we
pushed them to say now you call all your teachers and let's share your
experience with them, not our experience. Our experience happened
somewhere else. Your experience happened right here. And that's how I feel
the program scaled up to all the 80,000 children.
Now, we've done subsequently this kind of work in very -- in lot of other places
but the key ideas still remain the same. My own state is Behar, which is one of
the most backward states. And we've been able to work with Behar government
throughout the states by using techniques very similar to this. One is that you
have a technique that works and you have made it work. So you are convinced
of your own ability to make it work. Therefore, you are in a good position to be a
missionary. I don't think you can spread a mission that is not your own. And I
don't know, maybe people can. I think it helps to have your own -- your own
experience to sort of drive you.
The second is there have to be key people who also will try what you're saying
and own it. If people don't own it, then as soon as you go away, your idea goes
away as well. So how do you get large numbers of people to actually accept it?
And the one simple way that they accept it is by doing it themselves.
So out of this whole experience came this idea that you have to first recognize
the problem, you could realize that this is an issue that needs to be worked on,
you have to devote some resources to it, usually time, because money you may
or may not have, but time someone in the system, whether it's parents or
community members or teachers have to give extra time to the problem. And if
you measure what is going on that helps because you can then compare yourself
to others and see, you know, what works.
And at the end of this whole period you have to have some kind of sort of a
benchmarking to say that we started here and here is where we are at.
So this is kind of more or less how this big reading in the campaign has worked
in India. Around 2005 we felt that in areas where we are able to do this and work
with large groups of teachers or people from the community change is beginning
to happen. But India is a very big country. And in almost every population we
saw this, you know, it's a -- we often say in India is a 50/50 country. 50 percent
are doing really well and 50 percent are not. 50 percent can read and 50 percent
can not.
So how do you get this to the attention of the whole country so that this whole
business of, you know, is not just you send your kids to school because by sort of
the mid -- by 2004, five we had 95 percent children enrolled in school. So access
is no longer a problem, access is a problem in certain areas. But now it's a
question of everybody's in school. But if they're not learning, they may as well
not be in school.
If you're not able to finish fifth grade what is the point in wasting five years? And,
you know, we have -- we also pay since 2003 a special education tax to fund this
universal education, primary education in India.
So children are enrolled, there is access. As citizens we are all paying extra
money. But if you -- if the core thing of education is not happening then
somewhere on the national policy level the attention is not going to the where it
needs to go. So in 2005 we decided with we do the kind of assessment that I
just described to you? Large scale across the whole country.
We have about 600 districts in India. And out of these about 575 are rule
districts. And so we decided around 2005 that we would do a sample in all
districts in India. By we would do it meant that we had the sort of the
assessment technique. We knew it worked really well. We knew that it made
people think about what is going on. But we needed to find local people in each
one of these districts. The district was chosen because that's the level at which
the government plans are made for the school district.
And it's made annually. So anything, any inputs that are generated could
possibly go back into the next year's plan. And so since 2005 we've been doing
the study that Anoop talked about. It's called the Annual Status of Education
Report. The acronym is ASER, which in Hindi means impact.
But it's used all over the country in non-Hindi areas. And what this does is it
gives you an estimate for India, also for your state, also for your district on can
children read? We also have a similar thing for math. All of the things that I've
been saying, there's also a panel that goes for basic arithmetic.
Now, this report has led -- for one, it has almost 600 different organizations
across the country who are also doing this, even if it's just for a -- you know, a
short period in the year. But there is a current estimate available. So when there
is big change that happens in states, you can track it. You also know that there
are states where nothing is happening.
Year on year expenditure is going up, but on the basic, basic level of on the
foundational level nothing is going on. So it has made some amount of I think
focused attention on this issue. And very interestingly, we developed all of this in
India for our own purposes. But we find that there are people from other
countries who are coming to see this and now an ASER-like effort is being made
in several African countries. We are on our sixth year. But Kenya, Tanzania,
Uganda have done their first year. We recently had a term from Malawi and
Senegal come to look at what we do, both at the assessment level as well as at
the action level.
Because once you assess, once you find your child has fever, you can't stop and
say well, you know, we don't need to supply a medicine.
So this is sort of the way in which things have moved. We still have a long way
to go. The government machinery moves more slowly than you'd like. But I think
for us, for the next five years, the big challenge is how to get parents to really
demand that this basic stuff be done in school. It's still the idea among parents
that, you know, if my child doesn't learn, there's something wrong with my child
or there is something wrong with my -- you know, the way we are doing this.
Rather than that I need schools to deliver and as a citizen of India I have the right
to demand that from school. So I think that is the big challenge that sort of lies
ahead. Which is probably the challenge that many other countries are facing as
well. We are not the only one.
>> Anoop Gupta: Okay. Thanks. So I guess let's open it up to questions,
discussion.
>>: You did manage to train local people who are not part of the skill set, right?
Have you been able to translate the same thing to teachers in public schools
because I guess one of the problems if you don't have good teachers in public
schools because [inaudible].
>> Rukmini Banerji: A couple of things. And, you know, over the last few years
many different variations. If I give you some of the best example from recent
years Punjab is a state that is economically quite forward. But their learning
levels are actually -- if you look at their economic state and you look at their sort
of educational -- by educational status I don't mean whether kids are in school, I
mean whether they are learning. Punjab was much worse on than it ought to
have been if we think that economic development and education are linked, if
that is the case.
So what Punjab -- Punjab is a small state as far as India goes. They have
14,000 government schools. Which means they have about, you know, four or
five teachers per school. So that's the number of teachers. It took us about a
year and a half. The first year there was a lot of resistance and skepticism about
whether this could actually be done within a large school system. And it took I
think a good six, eight months to work out and get this ownership and this
leadership within the known system.
What Punjab government did in the last school year is that they did two or three
very important things. One is of course teachers were trained in this technique
as well as I think more than the technique they were trained to say think about
the kids who are getting left behind. And you have to do something about them.
The second thing is that they manage today do something which I think is quite
revolutionary, which is they managed to get away from the age grade system in
school. All school systems are organized by age and grade. That is the
organizing principal of schools.
What they were able to do for two hours every morning was to divide the school
not in terms of grade one to five, but in terms of children who have not yet
learned letters, children who can read letters but not words, and they gave it a
nice name. They would call it Mahal, like Taj Mahal, so you would be called word
Mahal, sentence Mahal, paragraph Mahal. And you could move from one Mahal
to the other as soon as you.
So this was one basic -- one was identifying the problem and training and giving
people resources for that. Second was that you provided a lot of supplementary
material to read at the level of the kids. So our textbooks often are quite high.
But if you are -- if you are in third grade and you're having to deal with the third
great textbook but you haven't yet reached, you know, the basic reading level,
you know, you don't want to read a first grade textbook because that's kind of
you know it hurts your dignity as a third grader. But you need stuff that helps you
to create and move towards that.
So the Punjab government took a lot of kinds of material that we had, published it
in very large quantities and gave it to children. And that was your story book. It
was not called a textbook. So you could then read your graded stuff at your own
pace.
The third thing that they did was they took measurement really seriously. So I
remember I went to Punjab before the end of the school year, around our school
year ends in the end of March. So I was in Punjab in February. And everybody
you met from the school system would tell you, you know, I have 20 schools
under me in six schools most children have reached up to the story level. But in
such and such school I have 18 children left and I need to move them. So there
was a very strong focus on how kids were moving.
And the fourth thing is that they invited in schools that didn't have enough
teachers. They allowed Pratham to mobilize from the village community to have
somebody come in and help during those two hours. These people in the
reading -- our big campaign for reading is called Read India. And these people
who are volunteers, village volunteers, they're actually not compensated.
So you have to actually mobilize people in the village to say can you give two
hours of time, you're not going to get anything out of it, there will be no money,
but if you want your village to improve, you have to help. You or somebody has
to help.
And so this, this, you know, all of these things put together, plus leadership from
the tops, from the state level there was a lot of focus on seeing this change. So
they also provided for about 7 or 800 people from within their own system who
are good teachers who would be visiting each person at 20 schools, specifically
for the purposes of helping schools, sometimes carrot and sometimes stick, to
see that everybody moved ahead.
And it was a huge change because going from school to school I -- at least in my
working life in India, I haven't seen schools where children jump up the minute
you arrive and say can I read to you? Can I show you that I've learned how to
read? So it also generated a lot of enthusiasm within kids.
Teachers, however, resisted this whole thing because this was a lot of extra
work. So it's not that they are ineffective because they are not skilled, they are
not qualified. I think the incentives within our school system for showing
progress of children is not very high. And so this year, there's been a big of a
backlash from the teacher's union who said that, you know, work increased as a
result of the events of last year.
So I think it's not a linear process. I think these things have to go and, you know,
it needs more years of this kind of targeted approach to solving problems to see
where it goes. But there are states in which teachers do accept it. There are
states at which they don't. There are governments which think this is a good
thing to do. There are governments which don't.
But by and large, the fact that you have to focus on learning issues now I think
nobody can get away from. Because all the children are in school. What are you
going to do next? Sorry you had -- yeah.
>>: [inaudible] particular method [inaudible] so I was just curious ->> Rukmini Banerji: The method as it turns out apparently is called the balanced
approach. So it's not a phonics approach and it's not a whole language
approach. These are the two big divisions at least in this country on how to read.
It -- we start the fourth -- I mean, I can train you in five minutes at least on the
concept of what to do. First is that every child has something like a story book
for themselves. And this when you produce in large scale, even if it's black and
white, large font, simple text, eight or 10 lines, it's a story book that every child
has.
So when teacher reads aloud, then something very common that most people do
in western countries, you read allowed to your child before they go to sleep at
night.
Here you would read aloud, but everybody had a book that they could follow as
well. And when you read aloud you pointed to each word as you read. Again,
very commonly done. When you read to your kids often you point to the words
as you can. So there is a -- the kid may not learn the alphabet right away, but
you need to -- you connect the sight of the word with the sound, right? And these
are quite short.
So you use a story for three or four days and by the time you're seven or eight,
three times I tell you a story, you already learned the story. So you are able to
recognize words out of the story, and from recognize the words then you begin to
recognize kind of consonant.
The second is that most Indian languages have a very straight phonetic structure
and for those of you who know Indian languages it's called the [inaudible]. You
know, every consonant and every vowel sound can be put in a nice, neat chart.
And that's exactly -- now, we don't have problems of English, which is that
everything that you see is exactly like you say it. There is no -- there is no black
board on which I can write. But it's a -- the phonetic structure really helps.
So we use that chart to actually -- in a way like a multiplication chart where in the
beginning you use it as kind of a memory device. But soon after that it's just a
help. And you would move away from it and do more complicated things with it.
So first you just move it horizontally across the lines. So it's predictable. Every
word has -- what's your name?
>>: [inaudible].
>> Rukmini Banerji: Ishwar. I need a name that begins with a consonant.
>>: Joseph.
>> Rukmini Banerji: Okay. Joseph, right?
>>: Yes.
>> Rukmini Banerji: So ja is the consonant sound. And the way our alphabet
goes it will be ja, ja, jee, jee, ju, ju, ju, jee, jay, jo, jo, jung, ja. This is the ja
consonant with the vowel sounds. I use it with any other consonant. The factor
will be the same. So kids pick up the pattern. And then they know that if I'm
looking for Joe, so for example if Joseph couldn't read Hindi, as soon as he
learned to recognize ja and knew the pattern he would find Joe because he
knows where Joe comes in the.
And then he would look for the next part of his name. This is the thing that kids
normally do with this chart. So we would use the chart for about 10 minutes
every day, where again I put my finger, I say it aloud and, and kids begin to catch
the patterns. Then we do a lot of oral word games, again with a particular
pattern. So we would say, you know, use a word, and come up with rhyming
words. So let's say nonny, bonny, tonny, lonny. It doesn't have to be meaningful
words, but these are words that have the similar sounds with just, you know, one
or two things changing.
Again, after two or three times of playing this, anybody can play it. I mean, we
can play it, even though you don't know Hindi because it's similar sounding. And
then soon you'll begin to see the connections between what you are seeing and
how the -- it looks in a written form.
And finally the fourth thing that we did which I think was the -- I think the most
innovative thing which is probably ours was that we come from school systems
where it's very wrote oriented, where the teachers write and you are always
saying, you know, the correct answer. And if you don't know the correct answer
then you don't say it. So what we would say is that every day the child has to say
something, it's sort of like a show and tell that happens in US schools, you have
to say something, and then you have to write it. So kid will say I don't know how
to write. Well, you may not know how to write, but you certainly know how to
say. But what you say has to be your own. Or if I ask you a question, then you
have to come up with your own thing.
Now, as soon as kids start actually talking themselves and expressing
themselves, which in most Indian classrooms is a -- it's not encouraged. There's
a correct answer and also as soon as you write most children are afraid of writing
because there's a correct answer. And we said here that you -- whatever you are
thinking, whatever scene you should start putting it down.
Again, it sort of begins as scribbling and they will scribble because you don't
know how to do it, but it begins to look like writing. And within 45 days or so you
are able to -- if you are able to say things and you're able to use a chart, then
you're able to write the -- there is a chart, yeah.
>>: [inaudible].
>> Rukmini Banerji: This is the chart.
>>: [inaudible].
>> Rukmini Banerji: Here is ja. This -- oh, oh.
>>: I'm sorry. [inaudible] it's just skipping [inaudible]. There it goes.
>> Rukmini Banerji: This is Joe. So this is the beginning of Joseph. And so we
spend another hour you should all be reading this. I know you have to go but -[laughter]. So that's essentially the technique. I mean, as you can see, it's sort
of common sense but now that experts have looked at it, they say it's called a
balanced approach.
>>: So what language did you -- when you sat in Bombay, did you use Marathi
or ->> Rukmini Banerji: See Bombay, from early days, Bombay runs school in eight
languages. So Marathi, Hindi [inaudible] Urdu, Tamil, Telugu, English. So
Bombay government schools are always run in all these languages. So we will
work in the language that children either speak at home or go to school in.
Now, out of all these languages English and Urdu are the tough once because
luckily English, you know, people learn later but Urdu is like English. Urdu is not
phonetic. But a variation of this technique has been used in Urdu, also, with
good results. It really frequency out the Urdu conservatives because that's not
how you teach it. But it's very appealing to those who have not learned Urdu
traditionally in schools because we use a phonetic method which -- so there's a
big tussle on the Urdu front, but our method is pretty effective in Urdu.
>>: So when you have those little villages and the locally, do they have to pick a
language? Because those kids may be all speaking different languages.
>> Rukmini Banerji: Usually, no, a homogenous language group. So even if
Bombay slums if we had to run three, we would run it in the same slum three but
they would be in three languages. So that you can stick to -- and it was usually
linked to what school -- what medium of instructions school would you go to
when you went to school?
>>: So this seems to be real sweet spot. You're doing a wonderful job. Are you
also trying to influence what happens after they ->> Rukmini Banerji: Yeah.
>>: Learn to read, fourth, fifth grade onward? And what are you doing about
content? Do you find you have enough content that continue to stimulate them
as they grow in skill?
>> Rukmini Banerji: See, we are still at -- I would say we have four major market
segments. One is the preschool where really the organizing of children to come
together in preschool is beginning to read aloud you know, doing preschool kind
of activities helps. So their content is not as much an issue, it's more the
organization of it.
The next is first and second grade, which we feel that if you really tackle first and
second grade well in the next couple of years, all of these problems should ->>: I was actually just showing some of the preschool things that ->> Rukmini Banerji: So if you tackle first and second grade and, you know, build
a basic arithmetic and the basic reading many of these problems in subsequent
years should be [inaudible]. The third one which we've really tried to tackle is
kids were in third, fourth, and fifth grade were not at second grade level. And the
fourth category which now we are beginning to be able to have time to deal with
is kids who are in third and fourth and fifth grade who are beyond the basic
reading level but need to be brought up to grade level.
Now, we -- last two years we've been really trying to see how do we cope with
that, given that the people who will work with the kids at least half the people who
work with the kids are local youth who themselves have come out of a pretty
indifferent education system.
And we find some of the elements that we've used before to be very helpful. This
idea that you have to speak, you have to -- if we read a story -- so in the reading
program we would read the story and focus more on the decoding part of it. Now
when we read the story, we actually have to have a discussion around it.
Now, this discussion approach, let us have a discussion about what is a story
about, let us pull from this things that you can relate with your normal life, let us
then create vocabulary lists of mind maps of things to do. These are the kinds of
things that we are doing now. Where the impact is not so much on school tests,
the impact is more on speaking on your own. Writing on your own. Which are
rarely measured in our school systems.
But actually lie at the base of many of these things.
In math, for example, one you're past this basic operational stage, the big next
hurdle is fractions. And the way our Indian numbers are structured, you know,
like here you said 21. We say one in 20. Two in 20. I think we need some
revolutionizing in the way we -- the vocabulary for fractions is really complicated.
It's not as easy a it's in English. So we are struggling with how do we do that.
And the third is English is really [inaudible] you know, no matter what people's
philosophy of English may be today, I think in any -- at least in India, to move
ahead you need English. So how do you now, at least for the languages and for
math, the grownups know some of it. But we now in English have a double
challenge. The kids don't know and the grownups don't know, but you need to all
move quickly. So you need to isolate the adults very quickly.
So we are moving -- I mean, I think half of India is creating English programs
right now. I'm sure you guys are too. Because this is clearly needed and
everybody wants it. People are willing to spend time. So, you know, the way we
are going about it is mixing your local language in English because if you actually
look at how many English words there are in Indian vocabularies and other, you
know, I was in a village in Rajasthan, really conservative part and I said to a
group of women, so I said what do you guys really want to learned? So they said
we want to learn English. I mean, there's no chance that they'll ever use English
in their life but they want to learn it.
And then one woman said I actually know some English. So her friends laughed
at her. And she said shall I tell you the words I know? And we said yeah. She
said missed call [laughter] bus stop, SMS for text messages. And she actually
made a list of 10 words sitting in a remote village and her friends stopped
laughing and said oh, those are English words, we didn't know, we thought they
were Hindi words. You know.
So how do you use a blended -- that's called blended approach apparently, to
use both languages. So that's our next one. And in Pratham we are not very
sure really after the fifth grade we should really get into large scale campaigns
because by then we are already seeing that in teaching fractions for example. In
Pratham we have about 6, 7,000 full-time people. Me included. Most of us
beyond a certain basic fraction are unable to explain how this whole fraction
[inaudible] okay.
So we need massive education in India at our level, you know. Percentage. If
you do a -- in the ASER server this year, we have a couple of interesting things.
Every year we do basic reading and basic arithmetic but we do a few other
things. This year we have four questions which have foxed many states.
One question is about a menu. One question is about a calendar. And they are
simple questions off of the calendar. Now, a calendar is a normal part of life,
even in villages you see calendars. And there's something like there's a calendar
for August and the question is what will -- what day will 2nd of September be?
I've had kids in 10th grade say you're asking a question for which the material is
not given. Okay. Now, because we are not taught to apply you know like think
on your own and figure it out, you know. So I have to say what do you think for
September will be? And I had eighth grader say you're asking me an unfair
question. Okay. And that's not because they don't know, it's just because you're
not -- you don't have to use your -- the second question is a menu from like a tea
shop. And it says a cup of tea is so much and syntax are so much. And three
friends go and they eat this, this, this, and how much will it be?
Very, very simple multiplication and addition. And this is to be given to fifth grade
and above. And we're waiting to see when the results come in as to how many
children in India can actually do these sort of what I would call everyday
computational tasks?
The third one is a tree needs so much square feet or meters, I forget, to be
planted. My father's farm is so much. How many trees can go in there? Again,
people are planting all the time. They know how to do it. But this calculation.
We had a percentage problem and we found that sixth and seventh graders in
large parts of India couldn't -- didn't know what the word in Hindi [inaudible] it's
actually like percent. You're going to explain it saying out of hundred, you know.
So we are moving one level up. And where we find that the basics of sort of
applied in arithmetic that you need in everyday life. You're learning it in school.
You're getting okay marks but you're not able to apply it to. So I think that before
we take that step, we need massive education among youth to figure out, you
know, what to do.
We are doing one thing which I don't know quite where it would fit in. But these
large numbers of volunteers, community volunteers who are teaching children so
far have been doing it for free. And we feel strongly that they should be
compensated in some way and money is not the only way.
So just two, three months ago we've launched and I think Microsoft has helped in
that, to say that anybody who teaches in read India will get a basic training in
Microsoft Office. This is called education for education. So that at least you
begin to build up a basic skill level of, you know -- this is not dealing with your
fifth grade and sixth grade math, but everybody needs a certain amount of digital
literacy.
And a lot of times these kinds of courses are available in your district
headquarter's town or in a small town but not available in your village. So here
what we've done is to say in a radius of 10 villages there will be a person with
two laptops who is there for four days a week and you have your slot so you
teach kids whatever time, morning or evening, and at a certain time you can
come to this spot which has been picked, a lot of things in mind but [inaudible]
proximity. Sometimes proximity electricity has been the other one, where you will
then while you are teaching the first -- while you are teaching in those 60 days
kids how to read, you get to learn, you know, Excel and Word and whatever it is
for the 60 days.
And we are waiting to see what this connection, how this will strengthen hopefully
the children's learning as well as youth scaling.
So this has been done in about 20,000 villages, four 20,000 villages right now.
And based on this year's experience, we'll see how, you know -- where this will
go. And whether then the availability of these two laptops within a 10 village
radius could be the place through which some of these other things which may
need more skill, you know, should go. And maybe Kindle will come next.
[laughter].
>>: I have two questions. First of all, [inaudible] the scale at which things
happen [inaudible] so the next question is how do you keep tabs on you as our
people [inaudible] what's going on when there's things happening in such large
scales. Like how do you keep track of things or even get messages out so then
they are actually integrated with [inaudible]. And the second question is what -you have [inaudible] for us?
>> Rukmini Banerji: Yes. Okay. The first thing is basically we don't try to keep
too much control. Because if you are operating on such a large scale, the basic
messages should be so simple. So for example, the campaign is called Read
India. So goal of the campaign is that all children should read and no basic
arithmetic. So, you know, the messaging has to be very simple. And the things
that you have to do have to be very, you know, three or four bullet points.
Because you can't have fine print and large scale work like this.
Now, things like identify the problem, you can't go wrong in that. I mean, you
may identify the children slightly differently but what we are saying is children
who are getting left behind focus on them, give them time, measure what you are
doing. Right? So let's say right now in India we are working in -- we've -- a
couple of years ago we were very large scale. The last two years we've decided
to kind of consolidate so we can build our own capacities better for doing slightly
higher level things. So we are currently working in about 250 blocks. So each
block has say hundred to two hundred villages. In a block we have a set budget.
So it's not just about running programs, it's about handling people, handling
money. And the budget is five lack rupees, 500,000 rupees for a full year to
include reading levels in these hundred villages.
There are five full-time people. Each person has 10 villages -- 20 villages or 25
villages to handle. And the basic measurements are put in place. So here's your
money. Here's the training. Here's your measurement. And there will be some
external evaluation as well. So we do some internal external evaluation as well.
So for a sample of all of these blocks, there will be a baseline and end line that
will happen.
So you collect your own data, which is also very straightforward and simple. It's
not very complicated. Because you need to collect the data not for me. You
need to collect it for figuring out what's happening to your kids. So that
measurement is integral to your work. And more or less that's, you know -- it's -you have to come and visit. Because it's a different [inaudible].
>>: What you saw there was, you know, I was visiting there, and it was rarely
you know it's [inaudible] in terms of how the teachers, how the volunteers, how
everything is [inaudible] there's also some of the picture in the back, you know,
which ->> Rukmini Banerji: Volunteers come in pretty much like you've come in. There
was some announcement I'm sure. Some of you must know Anoop. You're kind
of curious.
So I have for example how do so many people in India, why are they all -- you
know, this is not like Teach for America where it's somebody who is very highly
qualified coming from somewhere and this is going to look good on their CV and
all that. This is like you're a village kid. You've actually graduated from the same
school system. Somebody comes and tells you. We often do village report
cards using our assessment thing just to generate interest in the village. And
then we say if you want to help your village, I can help you. But if you don't want
to help your village, you know what, India has 600,000 villages, I'm going to the
next village.
Then usually people would say no, no, no, don't go, wait, wait, wait. We need to
do something here. So, you know, every village you can find couple of people
who are willing to give time and who also see that they have been successes on
their own. I was in a village in Behar and there was some agitation going on in
the city nearby for something. I forgot. College students were agitating to say
they didn't get enough jobs in the real ways or something like that.
So I asked the couple of girls who had volunteered for the program, I said how
come you aren't agitated. They said oh, you know, the boys are agitated
because they were very bright. But you know we were not very bright, so we are
helping the children.
So I think what are they going to get out of agitating there. Who knows? They
must have their own calculations. We felt we've already finished high school.
There's something I can do here. Why shouldn't I do it. So the motivations for
why people volunteer is quite interesting. It's not all that I'm going to save my
country and things like that. It's like this made sense, I could do it here, I had
some time so let me do it, you know.
>>: [inaudible] very just local level in some sense that you know there -- certainly
there is a Seattle chapter of [inaudible] that they have and you know, you can
give in the giving campaign. There is a [inaudible] tomorrow evening at the
Grand Hyatt, so you know anybody who is interested get in touch with me and I'll
certain supply some basic information to you.
>> Rukmini Banerji: But if anybody has reason to go to India, do let us know,
because I think -- what I find is the way all of this has moved ahead is by new
people looking at the issues. You know, you don't necessarily have to give up
your life and come work with us. But I think every set of eyes sees a new angle
that could be improved and also adds to, you know, what we are doing. So ->>: [inaudible] computers and things so to the extent you might think that, you
know, you can help [inaudible] you can come ->>: So the question was do you have how do you keep tabs on -- not keep tabs
on, how do you [inaudible] all the individual stories to kind of get a sense of
what's happened -- is there a process for that?
>> Rukmini Banerji: Yes. We have structure. So there is a district structure,
there's a state structure, you know, people meet once a month, you know, at
different levels, once a quarter at different levels. But I would say that our -- I
mean, maybe because I'm very keen on assessment, I feel that the assessment
structure keeps us all united, both in terms have the message and also in terms
of what progress we have made. And so in that sense, I find that the
measurement is really important, not just for the data it creates but also for the -for the unity, actually, that we are all working on the same thing.
We may do it differently but we are -- the goal is the same and we are trying to
kind of measure our progress to the goal.
>> Anoop Gupta: So let's have the last question and then what I'll do is
[inaudible] will soon be around, so we can ask, but it gives an opportunity for
those who want to ->>: I'm just wondering, how much of an influence have you had on the
government system? Have they actually adopted your techniques and
encouraged more sort of discussion within the class room, getting the kids to use
their own mind and apply the techniques that they [inaudible].
>> Rukmini Banerji: See, I would say that we have to break down the impact on
government in different ways. Firstly, we are also a federal system. So it's like
different governments are at different places at different times, you know, in their
thinking.
One main thing that has happened is a combination of [inaudible] is that the
annual plans that are made for every district in India are based on certain
guidelines, line items. Three years ago a new line item appeared which said how
much learning can you guarantee your children, how much money do you need
for that? So I would say in terms of allocation of budgets there has certainly
been a big impact. So that's number one.
Number two is that out of say the 20 major states in India, we have worked with
governments and partnership and there we said that we don't subcontract to us
because we haven't subcontractors, we are willing to work with you, which
means we need to have joint teams.
Now, when we have joint teams, there are lots of dynamics because other than
me and a few people in Pratham everybody of else is between the age have 18
to 25. So to sit in government meetings when you are 20 years old and talk to
somebody who is 50 to say oh, by the way, I think you can do it better is a big
learning on both sides. Okay.
If you are along -- I mean the first day it's not do because people say shut up and
you know, be quiet, you were born yesterday. But if you are together for a year,
then there's a lot of osmosis that happens. And also, I think that what happens is
the mid and the lower level government people begin to appreciate the energy.
So they may not accept your technique in terms of the paralogical technique but
they begin to accept some of the principals that we have which is their a problem,
we need to deal with it. The only way we can deal with it is to run around. You
can not solve problem sitting at a desk.
So I would say that the impact in terms of the fact that change can happen, we
need to have learning goals has perhaps been greater than the actual taking of
the [inaudible].
>>: What about the teachers who don't resist this technique, have you seen a
change in their ->> Rukmini Banerji: Yeah, would I say ->>: [inaudible].
>> Rukmini Banerji: Yeah. But, but this has to be constantly reinforced. You as
an individual will not be on your own path. I mean, there are some outstanding
teachers. They will use their own techniques anyway. But a bulk of mediocre
people have to be supported and sort of incentivized not just in -- not in terms of
money, but in terms of sort of.
>>: Inspiration.
>> Rukmini Banerji: Yeah, right. And we've seen the best results come when
the government machinery takes this seriously and there is large scale
community support. Because then that seems to give you the best results.
Some have the most backward states have shown the best results. And when
we analyze it, this is what we think it is that the whole centralized system takes
them seriously by, you know, having training, having their own measurements,
having their own supervision, senior people visiting. You know in India a lot of
people sit on their desks and rule the country.
As soon as you see senior people moving around the schools, that's inspirational
to say this is really important, that's why people are moving around. And then
having this large scale village volunteer. So it's not an either or. It's sort of like to
get a kid educated well, you need a good school and you need a good family and
you need a good community. You can't need both. And when families are
themselves illiterate and they want education but they don't know quite what,
then you need a lot of community support to sort of push them. And I think on
that front we need -- I mean on the government we need to do more as well. But
in a way, what centralized systems, you know, it's in a sense a little bit easier
than, you know, 200 million parents, 100 million of whom have not been to school
or have been to very different school convincing them that you need to pay
attention to your children's learning even though you're illiterate yourself. So
that's I think the big challenge that at least I feel for the next five years. And how
can you do this without actually educating the parents? So do we have to go
back into the -- you know, get them to -- what is the motivation system that you
could use with maybe technology would be one way. So I think that's ->> Anoop Gupta: Let's give Rukmini a big hand.
[applause]