Billion Readers (BIRD) Initiative

Billion Readers (BIRD), aims to ensure daily and lifelong reading practice for a billion people in India to serve a vision: Every Indian, a fluent reader. This seemingly impossible goal is made possible by adding Same Language Subtitling (SLS) to existing entertainment content on TV and streaming, in all Indian languages – word for word viewers read what they hear. SLS was conceived for mass reading in 1996 at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA). Built on a bedrock of evidence-based policy-making, that thought has now translated into the Billion Readers (BIRD) initiative. BIRD proposes reading literacy at a transformative scale by embedding SLS on TV and streaming platforms in all Indian languages to give a billion TV viewers automatic reading practice and improvement, every day and for life. BIRD is sharply focused on impacting the reading skills of girls and women. Over 60% of India’s non-readers and weak readers are female. Our priority is to add SLS on entertainment content that they watch with a passion. A fluently reading female population, the BIRD team believes, will unlock unimaginable possibilities of dignity, skill, and empowerment for all. Our work has driven national broadcast policy. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) passed the Accessibility Standards (2019) requiring all TV channels to add SLS on at least half the entertainment content they telecast. Besides literacy, BIRD’s systemwide implementation of SLS is driven by Indian language learning and media access among the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH). PlanetRead has served as the backbone of the SLS project since 2004. PlanetRead and the SLS project have run numerous SLS pilots on TV in Indian languages, built the evidence base, and championed SLS. Read more about our research & evidence work at: https://www.planetread.org/slsgroup