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programs where he could see a measurable difference being made, and his belief that the role of Pratham was to launch new ideas and letting others implement them. Pratham had always aspired to catalyze larger efforts and to impact the governmental system through a demonstration of cost effective solutions. He debated, “Should Pratham hand over the running of its direct programs? To whom should Pratham hand over these programs? One alternative was to hand them over to the government, but would the government be able to continue this work, especially with its history of poor policy implementation? Will the quality of output be lower?” Lambay believed that they could focus on more challenging goals in terms of greater skill levels or higher standards or even look at new opportunities in terms of working with disabled children. But the question remained, “How will Pratham reinvent itself?” Chavan and Lambay knew that they had to think carefully through all their choices, their decision would have a bearing on the future of millions of Indian children.

Dr. Madhav Chavan

Dr. Madhav Chavan was described by some as an educationist and by others as a political and social activist. His father, Yashwant Chavan, was the founder of the Lenin-inspired Lal Nishan Party, a party rooted in trade union activism, and as a youth, Chavan was influenced by the communist way of thinking. Chavan obtained his doctorate in Chemistry from Ohio State University in the United States. After a stint as a post-doctoral fellow and a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Houston he returned to India. Chavan explained “It just was what I wanted to do. In the US, there’s a set of problems and in India there is another set. It just depends on which set of problems you are ready to deal with.”4 He was appointed Reader in Physical Chemistry at the University Department of Chemical Technology, University of Mumbai in 1987. In 1988, while leading a strike of college teachers, Chavan wrote to then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Chavan recalled,

Something I had written in that letter caught his eye and I was invited to meet Education Secretary of Government of India, Anil Bordia, who was heading the National Literacy Mission, which aimed at imparting functional literacy to 80 million Indians. During the meeting, Bordia asked me why I was talking about social change without participating in it. I remember him asking me what the point of printing pamphlets was if people it was meant for could not read it. It got me thinking.

Chavan decided that making India literate so that people did not need middlemen and could be empowered was the thing to do. The government alone could not solve the problem of illiteracy, but if the citizens of the country worked hand in hand with the government they could make a difference. In 1989 Chavan set up the Committee of Resource Organizations for literacy (CORO) in Mumbai to help the University of Mumbai in its efforts at adult literacy.

Farida Lambay

Farida Lambay co-founder of Pratham and Vice Principal of Nirmala Niketan College of Social Work, described herself as a professional social worker. Her fascination for social work started when as a child she saw her father, a Government employee, doing a lot of things for the poor in rural Maharashtra. Lambay recalled, “When I saw a lot of children on the streets in Mumbai I always had this vision that when I grow up I am going to give them a house and an education.” In 1974 she worked on a project with 650 municipal schools in Mumbai where social workers worked with the schools to address socio-economic deficits and managed to lower the dropout rate from 48% to 10% in a span of 10 years. She had a passion for working intensively with children. After meeting Chavan in 1989 the focus of her worked changed from depth and small scale to width and large scale.

Pratham – Every Child in School and Learning Well 110-001

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Lambay and Chavan both worked with the National Literacy Mission, but by 1992 the mission started losing momentum. Around the same time, UNICEF initiated a discussion on primary education in India and Lambay played a key role in introducing Chavan to primary education.

Education in India

In 1986, the Government of India introduced the New Education Policy which made primary education a national priority and envisaged an increase in resources committed – to at least 6 percent of GDP. India was a signatory to the Jomtien, Thailand 1990 declaration on “Education for All: Meeting Basic Learning Needs”. In 2001, the Central Government introduced the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) programa to provide elementary education for India’s 200 million children. SSA aimed to enroll all 6-14 year-olds in school by 2010, retain them in school, and provide them with quality education at least till grade eight - a much tougher requirement than meeting the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) by 2015. The program focused on improving access to education by making a primary school available within one kilometer of all habitations, mobilizing communities in favor of education, supporting the training of teachers, developing teaching materials, and monitoring learning outcomes. The SSA was complemented by the Mid-Day Meal Scheme which provided free hot cooked meals to all children in state primary schools every day as an incentive for them to remain in school. The SSA also explored areas of public-private partnership. In 2002, India made elementary education a fundamental right of every child and in 2008 the Right to Compulsory and Free Education legislation was passed in the Parliament. Though the government spending on educationb had increased from $ 4.1 billion (3.84% of GDP) in 1990-1991 to $28.8 billion (3.68% of GDP) in 2006-2007, the goal of quality education for all still proved elusive.5

Though by 2002, the centralized State education system had set up a primary school within 1 km of 98.5% of habitations, India was still home to 280 million illiterate people.6 There was a three tier system of municipal, (State) private aided and unaided schools. In 2007, of all the schools in India, 5.65% were government aided private schools, and 13.85% were unaided private schools. Pratham’s ASER2008 reported a 37% increase in private schools among children in the 6-10 age groups in rural India between 2005 and 2008. In 2007 the enrolment in private schools stood at 27.6%.7 The municipal schools were generally perceived to be “good for the poor” but not effective, and the unaided schools were generally associated with those who could spend.8 Net enrolment ratio in primary education across all schools was 94.2%, yet only 73% of pupils who started Grade 1 reached Grade 5.9 Chavan believed, “Our challenge lies in defining quality in measurable parameters. The difference between how well most children can read and the textbook language is huge…Secondly, skill and knowledge are interconnected parts of quality. Our exam system tests neither. What is not tested is not learned.”10 The publicly funded education system also had deep maladies -- such as 25% unfilled teacher positions, while only half of those present actually worked.11 In the northern state of Uttar Pradesh alone, of the 0.28 million sanctioned posts in primary schools, 0.18 million were vacant in Aug 2008.12 The Government of India had started to promote private education since June 2009 with the passage of the Right to Education Bill, which assured 25% seats in private schools for the underprivileged, whose tuition the government would pay at a predetermined rate. Critics believed, “There is one clear reason for the miserable state of education in this country: the state has funded schools, not schooling.”13 Other issues were teacher accountability, quality and unionization driven to a certain extent by the political power vested in teachers through the constitutional guarantee for teacher representation across India’s Legislative Councils (the upper chamber of the State

a Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan is a Hindi phrase which means Education for All Movement.

b This includes spending on elementary, secondary, adult, university and higher education.


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Parliament). The problem was compounded by the fact that education was subject to both central and state legislation. This limited both standardization from the center and parent and local community accountability.14 Moreover the academic support network of the government which consisted of institutes for educational research and training present at national, state, district and cluster (a group of 14-15 villages) levels had proved ineffective in providing adequate support and improving education outcomes. Several NGOs in the education space had attempted to improve their performance but had not made any discernable impact. Chavan believed the main reason for the poor status of education in India was because policies and programs were not implemented properly.15

The Pratham Journey

Pratham’s mission was "every child in school and learning well" and Pratham had translated this mission into three key objectives - children between the age of 3 and 5 should go to a Balwadi (play school), every child between 6 and 14 should be in school, and they should be learning well. Chavan reflected, “Dreaming up a goal of universal primary education across India does have a certain absurdity about it, when the dreamers have no real power or authority to help them realize the dream. But that is the beauty of a societal mission.” By 2009, it reached out to 500,000 children in 43 cities and 33 million children in 305,000 villages through a wide range of programs. Over a span of 15 years Pratham evolved, it changed from being a service delivery network in slums and schools to a learning methodology innovator and then to an organization which not only impacted policy and practice but also acted as a training resource to the government. Pratham’s fund arising capabilities also increased from $20,000 in its first year of existence to $ 15 million in 2008-09.

Every Child in School

In 1994, UNICEF decided to try the concept of a Societal Mission in Bombay for achieving universal pre-primary and primary education in the city by 2000. Pratham was established as Pratham Mumbai Initiative, a Public Charitable Trust by the Commissioner of the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai, UNICEF and several prominent citizens of the city with a basic seed funding of about Rs 600,000 per year for three years.

The First Initiative-The Balwadic Movement Pratham decided to start with a 100 Balwadis in areas they were familiar with (see Exhibit 1a for a Pratham Balwadi). The teachers were recruited from the local community. Chavan described their approach, “We started with a clean slate, we had no experience. That is why we could come up with all kinds of interesting new ideas. Fundamentally, Pratham was a group of people who were entrepreneurs, and not wedded to a particular theory of education, or how to change.” A community survey which Chavan and Lambay had undertaken earlier had revealed that school teachers believed that pre-school was the need of the hour since the children’s foundation was weak.

Chavan believed that large scale work was required to ensure that every child was in school. His view was, “We need a solution now. We need to implement it now. Alternatives have to be scalable and fast.”16 On the other hand Lambay with her social work background had always looked at “depth and intensive work and not just scale.” Lambay described their final decision:

We said let’s start playschools first, let’s start something which is visible in the communities where the children can just come and play with the young girl who runs the balwadi. Don’t worry about her training; don’t worry about whether she has a Bachelor of Education degree.

c Balwadi is Hindi for a playschool or preschool.


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Where there is nothing let’s start with the first step. We are known as ‘Pratham’ which is ‘first step’.

Between 1994 and 1997 Pratham had scaled to 4000 Balwadis in Mumbai. Chavan’s approach to scale was, “you must demonstrate and pilot with a view to scale, so when you are planning, you plan in a way that you put in all the factors which would help you in scaling up and replicating operations.” Pratham was criticized for not paying enough attention to quality; in fact some people even called it ‘a factory.’ Lambay recounted, “I think we were quite sure what we wanted and I must say that our ground level stuff was just excellent. We looked at our program as a peg in the community to get to know what the pulse of the community is.” One of the key challenges to scaling up was grooming people from diverse backgrounds and economic status into good highly dedicated volunteers. Most people joined Pratham because it gave them a feeling of self-worth. Chavan elaborated, “If you visit Pratham, in slum communities or in villages, they will tell you: now I am somebody.” Instructors either moved up vertically into the organization or outwards to better paying jobs thus opening up opportunities for people from below to grow. Pratham helped people’s growth by trusting people and their abilities. Chavan described his approach, “I felt micromanaging is not required. I said, “Why don’t you try this?” I then sat with them and understood how they had done it and what they had done. So it was a whole process of learning for them and for me.”

However Pratham was unable to sustain the scale of its Balwadi operations for long since financial and organizational capabilities had not kept pace with the growth. Additionally the government introduced the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) for pre-schoolers which focused on nutrition and health. Non-formal pre-school education was a part of their mandate, which remained dormant. But, given the mandate it could lead to a duplication of efforts. Consequently Pratham consciously worked towards scaling down Balwadis directly run by them and by 2005 they had scaled down to a mere 423 Balwadis. Many of the Balwadi teachers were absorbed into the ICDS because of their work experience. Pratham’s focus shifted to training of these teachers and curriculum development. Orientation trainings where “learning by doing” and certification was an integral part of working were started. If someone wanted to train Balwadi teachers they had to first take a Balwadi class themselves, understand all the nuances and then train others. This applied to people across the organization. Lambay described its impact, “I think that was a very enriching experience for all of us, we learnt from our own experiences. We were no longer mere decision makers who were only telling teachers how to do it.” Pratham also started early childhood education resource centers which trained women and adolescent girls in early childhood education and care. Lambay reflected, “I find this a great journey that once upon a time you are a service provider, you get experience as a service provider. Now, you are at a point where you share that expertise and train people.”

In parallel, Pratham’s large scale urban model attracted the attention of the Government of India and it moved from a Mumbai based program to a national program. Pratham Mumbai was replicated as different trusts in 6 states, and by 2008, Pratham’s programs reached across 21 states. The replication of Pratham involved generating the resources and organization that would attempt to move the State education system to ensure universal primary education. Chavan’s philosophy of people management had helped the expansion. Chavan explained, “I believe in people. I let people go wherever they want, no questions asked. I trust them to do the right thing and the amazing thing is that when you trust people, they don’t let you down. Plus, it gets the job done.”17 People were trained and were given challenges which seemed huge but could be achieved, and they were asked to do something on their own. Usha Rane, Program Director at Pratham described this as “supporting thought with a constructive program.” Chavan had sent Rekha Jadhav and Sachin Chandorkar to Jaipur to help the Rajasthan government in mainstreaming out of school children. Jadhav, a young woman of barely 20, who had never stepped outside the slums of Mumbai started 30 bridge classes for out of school children in a city unknown to her in a matter of two weeks. Such incidents had a


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cascading impact in terms of inspiring self-belief in people and over time the trust Pratham placed in people flowed back to the organization. Of course, the trust and the empowerment that it brought about was accompanied by a responsibility to achieve certain goals, and with it came accountability. Chavan recounted, “When Pratham had to send 300 trainers to Bihar, a northern Indian state painted as the ‘criminal region of India,’ there was no dearth of volunteers. 50% of the people who reached Bihar were girls, most of who had lied at home to go to Bihar for about 25 days.”

Working with the School system-Learning Well

Pratham also worked with the school system to realize its mandate of ‘learning well.’ Lambay believed, “We have preschools, but once the children go to school, if the school system is not changed, then there will be drop outs. There is no point in working only in the community. Pratham had come into contact with out-of-school children and in-school children who were lagging behind academically and also were at the risk of dropping out. Many of these were first generation learners and therefore lacked the required learning support from their families. Pratham started working on enrollment of out-of-school children in schools. To prepare them to enter schools, Pratham started bridge classesd aimed to bring children to a minimum learning level before mainstreaming them into schools. The concept of Bridge classes had been originally created by the MV Foundation in rural areas and Pratham modified it to suit urban realities. It targeted children in the 7-12 years age group who had never attended school or dropped out. Beginning with an informal method they slowly graduated to a structured approach. Pratham also targeted the in-school academically slow learners through its ‘Balsakhi’ (child’s friend) initiative, which was the first ‘remedial education’ program in the Indian school system. The Balsakhi, a local community volunteer assisted the teacher by working with municipal school children between grades two and four who were lagging behind and aimed to help these students achieve literacy and numeracy levels of grade two. An evaluation conducted of the Balsakhi proved that it was a remarkably cost effective program. Children who were directly affected by the program improved their test scores by at least 0.6 standard deviations in the second year at a cost of about two dollars per child per year, while children remaining in the regular classroom did not.18 In 2001, the Municipal Corporation reviewed the Balsakhi programs running in its schools, however there was some opposition from politicians who were supported by the teacher’s union leaders. The program was shut down in the school system and restarted in the slum communities. In a span of two years the remedial education programs were running in slums of 19 cities.

Pratham’s programs to address issues such as remedial education and bridge classes had not offered the best solution because though the children made progress in Pratham classes, the learning achievement was less than desired. Pratham also was not able to impact the government system and make it significantly more effective or efficient. It was possible to teach children to write using high quality resources and by operating on a small scale. But Pratham instructors were poorly educated being products of the poor school system. Pratham spent significant resources in training and employed trainer monitors, but the diffused nature of Pratham’s activities limited the actual monitoring feasible. Limited funding further constrained their work and it was also very difficult to standardize predictable achievement results at the end of a defined time period.

Innovating teaching-learning methods: Learning to Read Pratham decided to focus on improvement of reading skills only in order to check if such focus would lead to improved and predictable results. A Learning to Read technique rooted in the nature of Indian scripts and language

d The Bridge course program was designed with the assumption that a bridge needed to be built to prepare and support out of school children or primary school age socially and academically to re-enter the formal school system.


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structure was innovated. This changed Pratham from a service delivery organization to one that could impact policy and the practice of education.

This technique relied on an integrated method of learning, which combined saying, doing, reading and writing and children learnt while being engaged in various activities. When children were engaged in a variety of activities which had implicit connections they made the connections and these then snowballed into a larger skill. One of the early users of this model commented, “I am not sure how, but we did all these activities and the children seemed to ‘pluck’ something out of the air and they have learnt!”19 One of the key ways in which children were taught arithmetic was by asking them to make a bundle of ten straws while counting and then to work with these bundles and loose straws to do the operations and account for them as they added, subtracted, multiplied or divided. The ‘magic wand’ for learning to read and write was a technique which was a modified version of Professor Jalaluddin’s - a literacy expert - method which used a ‘barakhadi’e chart for coding and decoding words. He had demonstrated that if school-going children were taught systematically by properly trained instructors they could be taught to read and write in three months. The technique began with assessing a child’s reading ability and categorizing him as a non reader, letter reader, word reader, paragraph reader or a story reader. The reading material given to children included alphabet cards, the ‘barakhadi’ (twelve sound chart), paragraph cards and story cards. The short paragraphs and stories were used from the first day to ‘play’ the game of reading. As children become familiar with the forms in the ‘barakhadi’ chart, they used the stories and paragraphs to practice reading.

One of the critical outcomes of the Learning to Read technique was the rapid and simple assessment tools created by Dr. Rukmini Banerji and others at Pratham. This innovation further established Pratham as a global innovator in years to come.

Holding the government accountable: The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) In late 2005, Pratham was grappling with the lack of reliable countrywide information on the

status of the education system in India. The government surveys only provided enrolment data, this data was not independently verifiable and often not published; there were practically no surveys on the quality of education. This was particularly important since the new Government had declared accountability, outcomes-over outlays, and transparency as its working ethic and had levied a 2% additional tax on every Rupee paid as central tax by any Indian. Chavan and his colleagues felt that the citizens should hold the government accountable for the impact (‘aser’ in Hindi) of the additional taxes. This motivated Pratham to undertake a survey to take stock and assess how much progress India was making as a result of additional funds committed by the government. It published the results in the form of the first Annual Status of Education Report (Rural) in Jan 2006. ASER assessed enrollment levels in school and pre-school, and children’s ability to read text and do basic arithmetic. Rane corroborated, “We defined quality in simple language by saying every child should be able to read, write and do simple arithmetic.” ASER2005 was the first quantification of how bad the quality of learning in India was.

ASER was a simply and innovatively crafted household survey of learning and enrollment levels, carried out by the people outside the government, by local organizations or institutions in each rural district in the country (see Exhibit 2 for a Testing Tool crated by Banerji and colleagues.). Pratham faced the daunting task of mobilizing and training ASER volunteers across the rural districts of the vast country. The volunteers were told that since every Indian citizen paid a 2% education cess to improve the status of education in the country, it was important for them to assess the impact. People from all walks of life helped in conducting the surveys. In a sparsely populated hilly region in

e Barakhadi was a phonetic chart which enabled children to recognize letters and vowel sounds.


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Northern India when Pratham was unable to get volunteers, the head of the animal husbandry department came forward and conducted the survey for them along with his colleagues. The volunteers received a nominal sum of Rs 500 per village to cover overheads such as travel and food. In 2008, more than 32,000 volunteers from NGOs, colleges and universities, youth and women groups completed the survey across 704,000 children in 16,198 villages across 564 rural districts in just 100 days. Chavan was proud of the dedication of the ASER volunteers and he recounted an incident about a group which had to survey a randomly picked village:

A survey volunteer called and said that there was a board outside the village which read, “You will endanger your life if you come in.” He wanted to know if he should go in. He was told not to go. But the volunteer believed that he should go in since the village had been selected and he went in. It was a dacoits’f village. Thankfully they only complained to him about the fact that there were no schools in their village.

ASER findings were disseminated widely within government and outside at the national, state, district and village level (see Exhibits 3a, 3b, 3c, 3d for a comparison of ASER findings over the years). Every alternate year, the volunteers visited schools to assess the supply side situation in terms of school facilities, teacher attendance, teacher pupil ratio and other similar measures. Lambay expounded, “ASER has been one of the turning points in the organization. We are now actually globally known, not just because we are good in quality but also because we are able to show credible data, which is not something even the Government of India has on an annual basis.”

The ASER reports changed the conversation from access to quality in the education arena. Sakshi Kapoor, who worked with the Research and Evaluation for ASER elaborated:

I think the whole debate of what education should be has been enriched, and I see ASER as a possible source. Earlier people stressed that children should go to school. But now there is another dimension to this argument and people say, “My child is going to school but what is he or she studying.” I think ASER has managed to shift the argument towards quality of education.

ASER 2005 and 2006 findings revealed that a significant percentage of school children, who had been in school for between 2-5 years, could not read, write or do basic arithmetic. Findings of ASER 2005 revealed that only 15% of children in Grade II and 25% in Grade III could read a class 1 text; only 17% children in Grade II and 32% in Grade III could solve subtraction problems. ASER 2006 continued to point to the gaps in the learning levels of the children. This meant a major intervention to improve quality was needed.

Citizens’ Initiative to Improve Learning Outcomes: Read India In July 2007, Pratham launched the Read India Campaign which aspired to help children between ages 6 and 14 within and outside the school system in India across all states in the country achieve reading and arithmetic proficiency by March 2009. The idea was to mobilize volunteers from every village to help children in their villages and to make the parents aware that their children could do better. Simultaneously, Pratham would approach the various state governments to set goals to achieve and initiate campaigns to improve learning. In order to facilitate campaigns on a massive scale, Pratham broke down into parts the innovative accelerated reading techniques which it had developed since 2002. Instead of insisting on using the whole integrated technique, Pratham first attempted to get governments to set clear measurable goals such as ‘all children should be able to read and write f A dacoit was a bandit.


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simple words by the end of Grade III’. Once governments committed to the goals, it was necessary to set aside an hour or two of the school timetable throughout the state. During this period, various activities which were a part of the original ‘Learning to Read’ technique were conducted. These activities targeted children at various reading levels. Children, who did not know alphabets, learnt them through activities. Children, who could read words with difficulty, but could not read sentences, were primarily engaged in reading aloud simple paragraphs. The original method was broken down because the teacher or volunteer could have only 2-3 hours for training. Moreover, on a massive scale such ‘training’ could not communicate a more complex technique and the idea was to target limited remediation initially so that children progressed thereafter as they engaged with their textbooks.

Research suggested that equipping teachers with the appropriate tools and learning methods could be more effective than only delivering similar interventions through outside agencies.20 Pratham formed a dedicated content team for developing teaching and learning material (TLM) in the quantity and variety required for their scale of operations. Cost constraints forced the team to innovate. Instead of books, they created reading cards, an innovative and cheap tool for teachers A reading card was a story or information condensed into one page. Information was color-coded to indicate the grade it was appropriate for (see Exhibit 4 for a Reading Card).

The Pratham team mobilized and trained school teachers, Anganwadi (ICDS) workers and volunteers, for the Read India Campaign. When the government partnered, the school teachers trained by Pratham worked on remedial learning inside their schools during the designated time. The volunteers either helped with the children during this time alongside the teacher or outside the school. Pratham mobilized volunteers by appealing to the goodness of the people. Chavan often motivated his volunteers by referring to the impact of Mahatma Gandhi’s Dandi Marchg:

In the year 1930, Mahatma Gandhi walked almost 300 km for 23 days and picked up salt. Hundreds of thousands of people joined him and it changed the history of India. You pick up a few books and read with the children around you. Hundreds of thousands will join you, and we will change the history of India once again.

By 2009 Pratham had succeeded in mobilizing 450,000 volunteers and training about 600,000 teachers and government officials. These trainings were primarily orientation sessions which typically took about 2-3 hours and on some occasions two days.

Pratham built partnerships with willing governments. Chavan described, “Partnership begins with planning to do something together. You have to create a relationship of trust. So then if you deal with the government or any other institution it is the personal trust that works. And then building that into institutional trust is important. If you leave it at a personal level and if the person moves then what do you do?” Each state had a Core Group at the state capital, which was responsible for coordination with the government beside other activities such creation of materials, logistics, accounts, monitoring, evaluation and reporting. The challenge was to align the government SSA funding with the Read India goals. However Pratham still maintained its own autonomy by bearing its own expenses. Chavan believed:

g On March 12, 1930, Mahatma Gandhi led a march to the coastal village of Dandi in Gujarat, India where he courted arrest by breaking the British law that allowed only the British to produce salt. With 78 fellow marchers he walked for 23 days, over 240 miles, to pick up a lump of mud from the seashore from which he made salt. The march was known as the Dandi March. When Gandhi broke the salt laws in Dandi at the conclusion of the march on April 6, 1930, it sparked large scale acts of civil disobedience against the British salt laws by millions of Indians. http://www.hinduonnet.com/2005/03/13/stories/ 2005031301680400.htm, accessed August 2009.


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When you want to partner with the government then you cannot be dependent entirely on government money, you have to have your own resources, you have to be able to stand apart from the government and build a partnership, the partners must have an equal standing or some proportionate standing. I must have some equity in the business.

One year into the Read India campaign, Pratham realized that transfers of government officers, poor governance practices, disregard for measured success on the ground, or inefficiency caused breaking down of partnerships that had actually shown good results. Where the government was not able to serve as a formal partner, the Read India campaign worked directly with volunteers in villages and urban slum communities. In the second year of the campaign, Pratham started forming ‘partnerships’ with thousands of village-governments if the state-government was not willing to partner with it. However, analysis revealed that the Read India program worked best wherever the state government and Pratham volunteers worked together. Where one of the two active ingredients was missing the results were less impactful, or statewide improvement was lacking. Dr. Rukmini Banerji, Program Director, Pratham explained, “I would say that the real big things are brought about by Government, not by any even large scale NGOs. If they focus on something, it will happen. If the government really decides to do something it aligns its whole machinery towards this goal.” Rane had demonstrated this in a big way in Madhya Pradesh in 2005-06. She replicated the success in the state of Chhattisgarh in 2007-08. ASER 2007 had showed that Chattisgarh, a state in central India was at the bottom of the list in terms of learning. The state project director of SSA collaborated with Pratham and planned a state wide program across government schools catering to standards I to V to focus on improvement in learning and basics skills. All government school teachers were trained, a huge amount of Teacher Learning Material was distributed and progress was monitored and evaluated jointly by Pratham and the government. ASER 2008 demonstrated the results – Chhatisgarh had moved to one of the top states on the ASER scale of assessment. A few other states also showed major improvement and yet many showed no improvement. Chavan estimated, "Just between January 2007 and July 2008, our estimate is that the program reached about 21 million children across India."

Progress of the movement was measured by the implementing network on an ongoing basis as well as an external agency appointed for the purpose. A survey undertaken to evaluate the impact of training and organizing volunteers to hold remedial reading camps for illiterate children showed that the intervention had a large impact on activity outside public schools -- local youths volunteered to be trained to teach, and children who attended these camps substantially improved their reading skills. The results showed that combined with the natural progress of children over the course of a year, all the children who could not read at all and attended the camp were able to decipher letters, and 35 percent of the children who could read letters and attended a camp where able to read and understand a story.21 Another independent randomized evaluation of a Pratham program in Bihar by Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab indicated that the children taught by volunteers made major progress but the problem was that the volunteers failed to reach a large number of village children. Better targeting, and wider reach was needed. Perhaps one village per volunteer was not enough and the volunteers needed to be better trained. Pratham had taken corrective steps to improve the situation. A massive training program to build the knowledge and skills of the Pratham personnel was launched. Rural and urban programs were reorganized to learn from the evaluations and the review.22

The Organization Structure

The Pratham network consisted of state chapters which implemented the programs in various states, independent trusts which facilitated local fund raising and implemented various programs, affiliate organizations which worked with Pratham as they shared a common goal and international


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chapters which were Pratham’s overseas fund raising arms (see Exhibit 5 for Pratham’s organization structure). Programs were decentralized and authority was delegated to very small units of work thus creating a very transparent organization. This was driven by Chavan’s philosophy, “It is a principle of Lao-Tsu. You have to disempower yourself to empower others. A leader is best when people barely know he exists. Not so good when people obey and acclaim him. Worse when they despise him. But of a good leader who talks little, when the work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: ‘We did it ourselves.’” 23 Chavan decentralized Pratham by hiving off some non-core and allied activities into independent organizations. The Computer Assisted Learning program was spun off as a small for-Profit company run by youth who grew from the bottom. The Balwadi health initiative was transformed into Niramaya Health Foundation. Pratham Books, Pratham’s publishing arm was born out of a need to make quality books available to children at low cost. ASER Center was in the process of becoming an independent organization. In fact some of Pratham’s state heads and program heads had formed their own NGOs which worked with Pratham. Chavan believed, “These are exercises in empowerment and also in sustainability through decentralization. A massive one big organization can become complacent and inefficient. Also, everyone needs a clear path and opportunity for growth. Then if everyone wants to work together, the bonds are stronger.”

Pratham was largely a volunteer driven organization, there were about 463,159 volunteers working for Pratham in 2008 as opposed to 4762 full time staff and 17,000 part time staff. Pratham had “the character of an open platform rather than a closed NGO.” Anyone who approached Pratham with a desire to collaborate was asked, “What would you like to do? What can we do together?” This helped create a “gravitational motion.” Chavan described, “There are professionals who take a sabbatical to come and work with us, other professional investment bankers and consultants, who leave their jobs to work with us, and retired military professionals. They oversee administration, analyze data, define strategy and train others. Others are college students, young graduates and homemakers, who want to accept a challenge, basically anyone who has a skill set and would like to help empower others with it.”24 Pratham operated in the education space but did not have any educationists. Chavan elaborated, “I don’t have an academic background in social work. Actually, I encourage disregard for all theories of social work in Pratham. However my colleague, Farida Lambay is the vice-principal of Nirmala Niketan, College of Social Work. So actually this friction between social work and non-social work has existed in Pratham from day one.”

The work culture was informal driven to a large extent by Chavan’s philosophy of trusting people. Chavan described the employer employee relationship succinctly, “An employee knows that though he is getting a check every month, if there is no money he will not get the check. He knows that if he doesn’t do well, he will be thrown out. But I don’t recall firing anybody for not working.” People who were not working just quit on their own because they found it a bit difficult to survive in an environment where everybody was working. Everyone was aware that they were not permanent employees and only in 2007 Chavan started issuing contract letters under severe pressure.

Funding

In 2007, Pratham spent about US$15 million and it planned to spend US$20 million in the financial year 2008-2009, equivalent to 0.1 per cent of the government's expenditure on education (see Exhibit 6 for a financial overview of the Pratham Mumbai Education Initiativeh). Pratham’s philosophy was that whatever programs they designed should not cost even at the peak of their activities more than

h Till April 2009, Pratham Mumbai Education Initiative (PMEI) was the mother organization. In 2009 a Pratham Education Foundation (PEF) was formed as the parent organization with all the chapters under it. However due to various old contracts, PMEI received about 70% of funding even in financial year 2009-2010. Over the next couple of years the funding was expected to migrate to PEF.


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1-2% of the education budget of the municipal corporation. However Pratham was often criticized for not spending enough but Chavan wondered whether increase in cost would increase the quality. In the early yeares, half of the donations came from the overseas Indian Diaspora and the rest came from corporations that invested in India. ICICI, a financial institution in India had been one of Pratham’s earliest supporters. Narayan Vaghul, former Chairman of ICICI had played a key role by activating the entire organization to the extent that lots of ICICI employees regularly contributed funds to Pratham efforts. In fact he mobilized top corporate leaders of India to join a wide scale movement to raise funds for Pratham. Chavan described it as, “It’s basically word of mouth transfer of faith and trust. Because I trust you, I get my network to trust you and then it sort of transfers. So this is how eventually Pratham U.S.A. was formed. All networks that Pratham has created even on the ground are like that.” Vaghul’s movement helped Pratham for some years but did not live up to its promise of raising funds on a large scale in India. Pratham increased its reliance on international donors which contributed to about 80% of Pratham’s budget in 2008. For instance Pratham was the first beneficiary of the partnership between the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the William and Flora Hewitt Foundation to improve the quality of education in developing countries.25

The recession had impacted Pratham’s ability to raise funds. Another issue was that sometimes donors were willing to support Pratham only for specific education causes and not for the universal goal of education. Chavan recalled an instance when a donor had insisted that there be 70% girls in a program. Pratham had turned down the donor because as Chavan stated, “The philosophical and ground level reality is that there is no gender disparity in India as far as primary education is concerned. Also, the point is to treat both equally and not to start another round of inequalities. Boys from underprivileged communities also are victims of a poor education system.”

The Question of Sustainability

Chavan and Lambay were concerned about how long Pratham should continue to exist. Chavan reflected, “The larger question is that of sustainability. Do we have a value that will repeatedly be in demand? How do I convince myself that we are really required? You have to keep watching whether you are part of the solution or part of the problem. What is our measure of success? How do we plan our way forward?” Pratham could either continue to run its programs directly or focus on launching new ideas that others could then implement. In Lambay’s opinion, “As the scenario changes, either organizations like us should change their agenda or should say, we have achieved so much, now we want to be a resource and we will allow lots of other flowers to bloom. Either you become direct service providers or facilitate others by becoming a resource.”

Chavan and Lambay wondered whether Pratham should continue because Pratham had created a definite impact and achieved some of its mandate. The Right to Compulsory and Free Education legislation had just been passed in the Parliament and enrolment in schools was no longer a major concern. The processes for monitoring of quality through ASER had been set into place. In May 2009, the President of India had announced the Government of India’s intention to come out with annual reports in five sectors, one of them being education. The Read India campaign which helped children achieve a basic level of skill in reading and arithmetic had already been underway for two years. Should they not hand over their legacy to government and other private organizations and focus their energy on some other area where there was a crying need for their knowledge and talent? The government had already demonstrated its initiative and willingness to take the baton forward, Pratham programs such as the Balwadi program were already being substituted by the government Anganwadis in cities such as Mumbai.

Moreover Pratham was a donor dependent organization and continuity entailed funding challenges. The funding issue could possibly be resolved by building a corpus or an endowment. But


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a corpus implied institutionalization and Chavan worried that institutionalization would kill the NGO spirit. Additionally a corpus could only protect Pratham’s core team and not really support the program expenditure on an ongoing basis, since program expenditure was large. In fact the program expenditure for 2009 was estimated to be $ 11.5 million.

The key question was, “What happens when Pratham withdraws?” Who would carry on what Pratham had started? Also what would happen to the thousands of people employed with Pratham at the grass-roots, who though perhaps not qualified were skilled in their areas of work, how would they find new employment? Chavan responded:

Where am I going to withdraw to? Overseas funding agencies can withdraw. But can the Government of India withdraw? Can the people of India withdraw? The challenge is to create a number of people who would take a long term interest in their own village’s education so it is not a question of withdrawing. In every village if these people are doing this work, it is really for them to decide. The danger is always for them if they withdraw.

Pratham’s supporters were aware that methods and material were easy to replicate, but they were worried whether Pratham’s successors could match its energy, drive and ability to mobilize dedicated volunteers on a large scale.

Chavan and Lambay’s overarching quest was to chart out the future path of the organization since Pratham was currently at a crossroads. They had to find answers very quickly because there was a danger that the entire social capital which Pratham had generated over 15 years, the expertise it had gained, the energy it had generated, and the resources it had created would vanish into thin air; not to speak of the children who depended on Pratham.


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Exhibit 1a A Pratham Balwadi

Source: Company documents.


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Exhibit 2 Raeding Testing Tool to find the level of the child. The 5 Levels are: Story, Paragraph, Word, Letter, Beginner.



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Exhibit 3a Yearwise percentage of all school children in different grades who cannot even identify letters.

Source: www.asercentre.org, accessed October 2009.

Exhibit 3b Yearwise percentage of all school children in different classes who can at least read a Std 2 text.


0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

Std 1 Std 2 Std 3 Std 4

2006

2007

2008

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

Std 3 Std 4 Std 5 Std 6

2006

2007

2008


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Exhibit 3c Reading Levels in Govt. and Private Schools in Different Classes as per ASER 2008.


Exhibit 3d Percentage Children Who can do Division over the years.


0102030405060708090

100

Std I can read letters at least

Std III can read Std I text at least

Std V can read at least Std II text

Govt PVT

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

Std 3 Std 4 Std 5 Std 6 Std 7 Std 8

2006

2007

2008


18

Exhibit 4 Reading Card


19



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Exhibit 5 Pratham’s Organization Structure


Pratham Network

Executive Council

National Executive

State Chapters

State Head

State Executive

Read India

Direct Urban

Admin./ Accounts

Independent Trusts

Pratham Mumbai Education Initiative

Pratham Delhi Education Initiative

Pratham Rajasthan

Pratham UP

Pratham Ahmedabad

Pratham Mysore

Pratham Pune

AksharaFoundation

Pratham Books

Affiliates

Aid India

VidyarambamTrust

International Chapters

Pratham U.S.A

Pratham U.K

Pratham Germany

Pratham UAE

Pratham Hong Kong

Pratham Canada

Vertical Programs

Pratham Cell for Vulnerable

Children

Vocational Training/

Computer Assisted Learning

Other Special Projects

National Resource Centre

English Program

Content Development

Early Childhood Care & Education

Training and Innovation

Research and Evaluation

ASER Institute

Central Admin./Accounts


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Exhibit 6

Financial Overview of Pratham Mumbai Education Initiative from 2003-2008 (US$ ‘000)

Particulars 2003-2004 2004-2005 2005-206 2006-2007 2007-2008Income 3197 3622 6066 9179 14349 Donations 2934 3322 5684 8803 14053 Interest and other Income 263 300 382 376 296 Expenditure 3027 3257 5298 8216 10676 Expenditure on objects of the Trust 2025 2520 3561 6671 8546 Honorarium to teachers 487 542 634 1201 1341 Teaching and Learning Material 255 376 511 1320 630 Program Support and Management 982 1269 1515 2380 1600 Research and Documentation 35 49 74 57 Resource Center Expenses 82 86 142 228 339 Read India 3172 Outreach/Pratham Cell for Vulnerable Children 78 70 290 444 575 Special projects 142 142 419 762 817 Misc. Expenses 1464 1355 Donations to Affiliated Trusts 733 528 1257 1374 1721 Establishment Expenses 177 123 283 265 273 Remuneration to Trustees 21 4 16 16 16 Audit, Legal and Professional Fees 18 8 14 18 16 Depreciation and Amortization 53 74 166 133 117 Surplus/(Deficit) 170 366 768 700 3659



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Endnotes

1 Madhav Chavan, Building societal missions for universal pre-school and primary education. The Pratham experience (International Institute for Educational Planning, Paris, 2000), p.9.

2 Monika Joshi, “Educating India, one Village at a time,” India Abroad, July 4, 2008.

3 Madhav Chavan, Building societal missions for universal pre-school and primary education. The Pratham experience (International Institute for Educational Planning, Paris, 2000), p.83.

4 Priyanka P. Narain, “Madhav Chavan: Empowering India through education,” livemint.com, Nov 7, 2007, http://staging.livemint.com/2007/08/31005812/2007/11/07000207/Madhav-Chavan--Empowering-Ind.html, accessed May 2009.

5 Selected Educational Statistics 2004-2005, Government of India, Ministry of Human Resource Development, Department of Higher Education, Statistics Division, New Delhi 2007.

6 Chapter on Elementary Education (SSA & Girls Education) for the XIth Plan Working Group Report, p.9., http://education.nic.in/Elementary/main_final.pdf, accessed August 2009.

7 Elementary Education in India, Progress towards UEE, Flash Statistics Provisional (National University of Education Planning and Administration, 2009 ), http://dise.in/downloads/Flash%20statistics2007-08.pdf.

8 Madhav Chavan, Building societal missions for universal pre-school and primary education The Pratham experience: International Institute for Educational Planning, p.26.

9 MDG Monitor, “MDG profile: India,” http://www.mdgmonitor.org/factsheets_00.cfm?c=IND&cd=356, accessed July 2009.

10 Madhav Chavan, “The Backyard Revolution,” Outlookbusiness.com, August 23, 2008, http://business.outlookindia.com/inner.aspx?articleid=1940&editionid=51&catgid=12&subcatgid=909, accessed June 2009.

11 Andy Mukherjee, “Google, Gates, Indian Diaspora Bet on Children,” Bloomberg.com, February 28, 2008, http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=apnpCWrLAUsc&refer=home, accessed June 2009.

12 “Classroom in Crisis”, India Today, Aug 4, 2008.

13 Andy Varma, Fund schooling, not Schools,” livemint.com, September 20, 2007, http://www.livemint.com/2007/09/20011225/Fund-schooling-not-Schools.html, accessed August 2009.

14 Nandan Nilekani, Imagining India: Ideas for the New Century (Allen Lane, India: Penguin Books India, 2008), p. 195.

15 Madhav Chavan, Building societal missions for universal pre-school and primary education The Pratham experience: International Institute for Educational Planning, p95.



18 Abhijit Banerji, Shawn Cole, Esther Duflo, Leigh Linden, “Remedying Education: Evidence from two Randomized Experiments in India,” NBER Working Paper 11904, December 2005, pp.33.

19 Madhav Chavan, “Read India,” Pratham Resource Center Working Paper Series: 2004:1, 2003, p. 11.


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20 Fang He, Leigh L. Linden, Margaret MacLeod, “How To Teach English in India: Testing the Relative Productivity of Instruction Methods within the Pratham English Language Education Program,” July 1, 2008.

21 Abhijit Banerji, Rukmini Banerji, Esther Duflo, Rachel Glennerster, Stuti Khemani, “Pitfalls of a Participatory Programs: Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation in Education in India,” NBER Working Paper 14311, September 2008, pp1-7.

22 Pratham Newsetter Jan-Feb 2009, http://www.pratham.org/newsletter/Pratham-newsletter-Jan-Feb-09.pdf, p1.



25 Monika Joshi, “Educating India, one Village at a time,” India Abroad, July 4, 2008.

Documents

Pratham – Every Child in School and Learning Wellapi.ning.com/files/OV-W8Ws8c7HOS2NYHLve8Rn5dlrAW2m6xB0...d provide e r Pratham sti rida Lambay rporation of ity.1 Over a f US$ 13,000