Monday, April 07, 2008

Power of subtitles April 6, 2008

Girirajsingh Natubha studied up to Class 2 in Jamnagar. All his life he struggled to read simple words. A few years ago, however, he found to his surprise that he had begun to read. It happened quite amazingly after he began watching Chitrageet, a Gujarati television program of film songs, which had sub-titles at the bottom of the screen. Since he knew many of the songs, he could anticipate the next word. When it appeared he would read it unconsciously and sing along, Karaoke style. Soon he found he was able to recognise words in the bazaar and before long he was reading headlines in the newspaper.

A brainchild of Dr Brij Kothari, a social entrepreneur and an IIM professor at Ahmedabad, ‘Same Language Sub-titling’ is a simple but powerful idea which is proven to improve literacy among adults and children. When lyrics are sub-titled on film songs, and words appear in sync with the actor’s voice, the viewer makes a sub-conscious link of the spoken to the written word. Literacy, thus, takes a sudden leap for early and struggling readers. Based on his powerful academic findings, Kothari decided to become a social entrepreneur and help raise India’s literacy. Between 1997 and 2002, he made countless attempts to persuade Doordarshan to allow him subtitle film songs on TV. Each time he was thrown out of their offices. In 1999, a new director at the Ahmedabad Kendra agreed to experiment with subtitles on four episodes of the Gujarati program, Chitrageet. It created such a sensation that they had to continue it for a year.

The breakthrough, however, came in 2002 when a new Director General of Doordarshan, Dr. S.Y. Quraishi, overrode the objections of his entire risk-averse staff and allowed Kothari to subtitle their hugely popular national program Chitrahaar. It happened soon after he won the $250,000 global innovation prize from the World Bank, which he used to pay for the cost of sub-titling. For the past five years, every Sunday morning, 15 crore persons have watched Chitrahaar and Rangoli with subtitles. A Nielsen-ORG study, conducted in 2002 and 2007 to assess the impact of sub-titling, showed that only 25% schoolchildren could read a simple paragraph in Hindi after five years of schooling. However, this jumped to 56% if they were also exposed to subtitling for 30 minutes a week on Rangoli. Equally dramatic results were found among adults.

Despite this success, however, a Damocles’ sword hangs over Kothari’s head. Unless Prasar Bharati takes a policy decision, subtitling will depend on the whims of each CEO, although the last two have been supportive. Moreover, the Department of School Education and Literacy ought to fund subtitling rather than Kothari having to go with a begging bowl each year to raise funds. It costs a pittance (one paise per person per week) compared to the rewards of giving lifelong reading practice to 15 crore early-literate personse every week. Since subtitling also raises the ratings of the program by 10-15%, I’m surprised private channels have not jumped into this game, including children’s cartoon channels.

You’d think that the best way to bring about change in a democracy is through politics. But when our political class is callous, unreliable and venal, you have to depend on individuals. India has always had our spiritual entrepreneurs, the most famous being the Buddha. In recent years we have seen the flowering of business entrepreneurs, making India one of the world’s most dynamic economies. Now we have also begun to produce social entrepreneurs like Brij Kothari who are making a difference. Hence, India is rising not because of its political leaders but despite them.

Thackeray scores a self-goal March 23, 2008

The damage is done. Hit by an exodus of North Indian labour in the past two months following Raj Thackery’s Marathi rage, industrialists in Pune, Nashik, and Thane have slowed their expansion plans in Maharashtra and are looking towards other states. They fear a return of the old nightmare when Datta Samant’s labour militancy combined with Bal Thackeray’s xenophobia drove white collar jobs from Mumbai to Bangalore and blue collar jobs to Gujarat.

In a free market, investment flows to the most attractive destination. What makes a destination attractive is, in part, the availability of industrious workers. Immigrants everywhere tend to be hungrier and harder working than locals. Economists like Harvard’s Richard Freeman, have shown that societies that encourage immigration outperform those that do not. This is why experts predict that America will remain competitive in the 21st century, while Europe and Japan will decline. As a land of immigrants, America is more capable of accepting immigrants, unlike Europe and Japan which have historically failed to absorb outsiders. Under pressure of ageing populations and shrinking workforces, Europe and Japan will thus lose out to China and India. .

The Indian Railways sells 6. 4 billion tickets annually. Assuming a third are commuters, this means roughly four journeys per person per year in a nation of 1.1 billion people. We are a nation on the move, especially the poor in search of jobs and a better life. Our cities are becoming more cosmopolitan and an Indian identity is being forged, which will increasingly trump regional identities. This imposes real costs on Raj Thackeray’s bigotry.

Maharashtrian workers do have a legitimate problem, however. How do they respond to the challenge of more nimble and productive immigrants? The answer is to make Maharashtra even more attractive for investment. Raj Thackeray should push for better infrastructure, better colleges, and better vocational schools. This will make Maharashtrians more skilled and more competitive. Eventually, many will move up into the middle class and leave the menial jobs to migrants.

There is a more troubling question, however. What makes ordinary, decent Maharashtrian boys turn into a violent and cruel mob? It is the same question that Germans have asked for 75 years—“how did we become evil Nazis in the 1930s?” David Livingstone Smith tries to answer this in his book, The Most Dangerous Animal. He argues that all human beings are disposed to evil—it only needs a trigger like Hitler or Thackeray. The men of the German Reserve Police Battalion 101, who shot 38,000 Jewish unarmed civilians one afternoon, were “middle-aged family men without military training or ideology”. The same could be said of all mass killings. The murderer could be you or me. Scientists explain our violent tendencies through our genes. Like all social animals, from ants to chimpanzees, we are highly xenophobic. The more closely knit we are, the more aggressive we are to outsiders. Our Constitution makers realized the dangers of giving power to the human animal—hence they set up a system checks and balances.

Raj Thackeray is not the only one to score a self goal. Malaysia’s “bumiputra” movement continues to drive investment from Malaysia to other South East Asian countries. Germany failed to attract Indian software engineers a few years ago, despite an attractive ‘green card’ scheme, because its people are inhospitable to immigrants. In a competitive world, it takes maturity and luck to realize that immigrants make a society successful.