The Indian education sector has come a long way in upgrading its pedagogy and introducing newer courses relevant to the changing times. Yet, a large number of children in India continue to be illiterate even today. Many organisations are providing a helping hand to the government by educating children in ways possible for them. One such organisation is the Piramal Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Piramal Group, which has collaborated with tech giant Google.
The two firms have launched an initiative to help six lakh children in India learn to read with the help of Google’s ‘Read Along’ tool. It is a speech-based reading tutor app built with AI.
This initiative is operational in India’s 30 districts across six states — Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, and Chhattisgarh. It will continue to educate children for two years.
The Foundation in its statement said that this learning initiative will empower 3,000 plus managers to train more than 30,000 teachers across the country thereby improving the foundational literacy among students aged 5-11 years.
The Piramal Foundation has been playing an instrumental role for the past 15 years in the health, education, sanitation, and social sector of the country with the help of tie-ups with governments, international and national organizations, and academia.
This current initiative of the foundation is in line with the Ministry of Education’s NIPUN Bharat initiative (National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy). The government’s initiative too, aims at strengthening the foundational literacy of every child in India by 2026–27.
