Elinor Sisulu looks at how illiteracy was addressed in India
There is passion aplenty in India for books and reading. India is one of the major book-producing countries in the world, ranking third after the United States and Britain.
According to the Federation of Indian Publishers, India produces 60 000 titles every year in 18 languages. The country’s book industry has a strong infrastructure. India is the only developing country that boasts a fully-fledged book promotion division in the Department of Education.
India’s success in book promotion and development of a reading culture can be attributed to a large extent to political support at the very highest level. India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, believed passionately that people need a strong reading culture in order to better understand and value their diverse cultural heritage.
Nehru’s passion for books was translated into the establishment of institutions such as the National Book Trust and the Sahitya Akademi to promote literature and reading. Nehru also gave support to his friend Shankar Pillai in the setting up of the Children’s Book Trust. Pillai organised a writing and painting competition for children in 1949. The response was so enthusiastic that in the following year he opened the competition to children in other countries. The result was Shankar’s International Competition for Children. This annual competition continues to attract tens of thousands of entries from children all over the world.
The passion for reading displayed by Nehru and his contemporaries was backed up by government investment in institutions such as the National Book Trust and the Sahitya Akademi Government Sponsorship, and has meant that these institutions have been able to focus on the business of promoting literary. The same can be said for India’s National Literacy Mission, which was awarded Unesco’s Noma Literacy Prize for 1999. It mobilised over 10-million volunteers, the largest ever mobilisation in the history of the country. Illiteracy is still a major problem but the work of the Literacy Mission has ensured that this situation will change, and projections based on performance indicate that the mission will attain its objective of full literacy by 2005.
Another factor in India’s success in promoting literacy has been government investment in Indian languages. This has ensured that all sectors of the population have access to reading material in their own languages.
The Sahitya Akademi undertakes literary activities in 24 Indian languages. Annual seminars in each of the 22 recognised languages are held, based on suggestions from 22 language advisory boards. Because of its concern that writers and readers in different regions of India know very little of what is being written in neighbouring linguistic areas, the Akademi has pioneered the field of inter-language translations.
The Sahitya Akademi Library in New Delhi is one of the most important multilingual libraries in India with books on literature in the 22 languages recognised by the Akademi and other Indian and foreign languages.
The National Book Trust of India also follows the principle of linguistic diversity in its programme of publishing affordable books, promoting books and reading, and assisting authors and publishers. It plays a nation-building role by publishing series such as India – the Land and the People, which deals with the environment and cultural traditions of India, and Aadan Pradan, which presents well-known literary works, mainly novels and short stories, of a particular language to people of other Indian languages.
As we grapple with strategies to promote a culture of reading in South Africa we would do well to learn from the passion with which India has approached the promotion of literature, reading and literacy. That passion is backed up by investment in the institutions devoted to building a sustainable culture of reading that affirms national languages, history and values.
Elinor Sisulu chaired the Masifunde Sonke reading campaign before it was absorbed into the South African National Literacy Initiative.
— The Teacher/Mail & Guardian, Johannesburg, April 2001.