how bollywood is teaching india to read

Love this thought of the day from the New York Times (tip: Will - thanks!):

Think of the old follow-the-bouncing-ball singalongs, with a serious purpose. In The Boston Globe, Riddhi Shah writes that “same-language subtitling” of music videos in India improves literacy, once people become curious about the text at the bottom of the screen:

Indians and musical device for learning to read.

 According to Hema Jadvani, a researcher who has been studying the effects of the subtitles on Khodi [in western India], newspaper reading in the village has gone up by more than 50 percent in the last decade. Her research also shows that the village’s women, who can now read bus schedules themselves, are more mobile, and more children are opting to stay in school.

India’s public karaoke-for-literacy experiment is the only one of its kind in the world. Technically known as same-language subtitling, or SLS, it manages to reach 200 million viewers across 10 states every week. In the last nine years, functional literacy in areas with SLS access has more than doubled. And the subtitles have acted as a catalyst to quadruple the rate at which completely illiterate adults become proficient readers.

The article adds that “this is big news” for fighting poverty, since literacy “is linked not only to economic growth, but to better health, greater gender equality, and a more transparent political process.”

It's originally an article in the Boston Globe. The development community has understood for a long time that literacy is a key step in building an economic future. The problem is that the conventional method of teaching people to read is labor-intensive and time-intensive, and requires access to ancillary reading material. But with the advent of television, even in the rural areas of India, and the popularity of its Bollywood film industry, a whole new vector to transmit information is being put to use.

I've talked at length about design for the developing world and of course, India holds a special place in my heart. This is a great example of a keen understanding of a target population and some very thoughtful and deliberate (yet unobtrusive) design to create access to literacy.