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At 21, Assam’s Uttam Teron was just as ordinary as anyone. But his life turned when he came across some children playing in the mud instead of going to school.   To educate these children, he converted his cowshed into a classroom and started teaching them for free. Later in 2003, with Rs 800 in his pocket, the BSc graduate turned his classroom into a non-profit school called Parijat Academy.   As the word spread, more parents started sending their children. Today, along with 22 trained […]

He was meant to be thinking about revision timetables, last-minute doubts, and the familiar pressure of board examinations. Instead, Aarav Vats learnt to measure time in hospital appointments, in the silent wait between chemotherapy cycles, and in the fragile moments when strength returned just enough to open a textbook. Somewhere in that strange overlap of adolescence and illness, a Class 10 student from Delhi kept studying. When the CBSE results were declared, his score of 96.6 percent did […]

Originally reported and written in February 2023, this story has been republished as part of our archival content. For Dr Brij Kothari, the ‘eureka!’ moment came while watching a Spanish film back in 1996. The 58-year-old academic social entrepreneur wondered how beneficial it would be for reading literacy in India if Bollywood films, too, had subtitles in Hindi.    That’s how BIRD, or the Billion Readers initiative, was conceived.    Dr Brij Kothari   Soon after this incident, Dr […]

In Marsavalli village in Maharashtra’s Chhatrapati Sambhaji Nagar district, an 86-year-old woman recently sat on a wooden bench in a classroom, holding a pencil with careful attention, as she attempted a literacy test under the ULLAS Nav Bharat Saaksharta Karyakram. Her name is Anusuya Bai Wadekar, and her presence in that room carried the weight of an unfinished beginning that dates back nearly a century. She was born in a time when schooling for girls in rural India was often treated as […]