The Learning Curve

SARANDEEP Kaur, 6, is a small girl with a huge smile. Dressed in an oversized blue salwar-kameez, she turns a deep shade of pink as she reads out two stories, and does three formidable additions and subtractions. Six months ago, this class II girl of Govt Primary School at Kamalu village could not even recognise alphabets, and the less said the better about arithmetic. Today, she is the poster girl for Learning to Read (L2R), a community-administration effort spearheaded by an NGO called Pratham in 100 schools of Bathinda district.

Daughter of dairy farmer Harsha Singh, Sarandeep is among the 4,262 children who've lapped up the three Rs under this programme that got rolling in April. For the twin villages of Kamalu-Siwach tucked away in the depressing boondocks of Talwandi Sabo, miles away from bright city lights and prosperity, L2R spells hope for the future.

As Sarpanch Shanti Kaur puts it: ''Thank God, our children have finally begun to read and write. May be, they will one day be freed from this drudgery of farming.''

Vivek Sharma, the state coordinator for Pratham, and the brain behind L2R, was more concerned with improving the 3Rs when he conceived this programme soon after reading the Annual Status Education Report (ASER) 2005 that painted a grim picture of Bathinda. ''It had found that over 82 per cent of kids in class II to V could not read a simple story in Punjabi and 62 per cent were a zero at subtraction,'' recalls Sharma.

Things began to fall in place when he found an enthusiastic partner in Rahul Bhandari, the young deputy commissioner, and a generous donor in Om Singla, an NRI philanthropist from Bathinda.

Soon the almost all-girl army of 100 Sikhya Mittars (Friends of teaching) governed by nine-odd supervisors and an academic head, was in place along with a learning model that stressed on phonetics and story-telling. Children were tested for their skills in 3 Rs and then clubbed into two classes of 25 each, one to be taught before recess and the other after. Six months on, it has reaped rich results with 79.5 per cent of its children learning to read, and 89 per cent getting proficient in maths.

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