It’s always frustrating for me to sit in a math class. I’ve realized that whenever I do, I understand nothing.
And, I only blame myself for being so ridiculous with the subject. Isn’t that how students in the rural areas feel when they suddenly move to bigger cities for higher education? Let’s not kid ourselves, a majority of the college degrees are conducted in English.
With respect to their interest, Pranil Naik devised a plan. He began by identifying the cause, ie, the deficit of English speaking teachers in the rural areas. It took him years to bring forward a product which would prove to be a solution to all the issues.
And so, the English Literacy Program was built on top of a translation algorithm, which would help translate any regional language of India into English, and also the other way ’round. And, that’s how English started being treated as a subject, and not a language, per se.
“I think I am an entrepreneur in hindsight. I started out wanting to do something meaningful outside of my daily job. There was no desire to scale or build an organization. Just the desire to spend every free minute doing something that I felt was necessary and ought to be done. I spent 4-5 years doing just that. Eventually, the decision to put a structure on that effort came up, and that was perhaps when the organization took form and the entrepreneurial idea really set in.” Pranil told The Better India.
“At the early stages especially, it was extremely vital to have a community you could lean on. People you could use as a sounding board for questions, doubts, and fears,” he said.
Pranil’s project Leap For Word is working towards its goal of making India’s first English-literate village. One of its teachers Shyamlal Pawara is currently dedicatedly working with village Joyada in the Shirpur district of Maharashtra. Here, he’s collaborated with the Gram Panchayat, the Zilla Parishad school teachers, and more.
Looks like it won’t be long before college is no more to them, what maths is to me.