Interview with Geeta Dharmarajan, Founder and Executive Director of Katha
by Aline Pereira*

Geeta Dharmarajan is the Founder and Executive Director of Katha, an Indian non-profit organization working in the areas of formal and non-formal education, publishing and pro-poor activities. The word "Katha" means “story” in most Indian languages and, fittingly, the organization's tag line is "We create India's reader-leaders".

Started in 1988 with a magazine for children from the underserved communities in north India, Katha’s work now spans the literacy to literature continuum. By seamlessly connecting grassroots work in education, urban resurgence and story, they bring children living in poverty into reading and quality education.

To date, through its many programs, Katha has brought schooling to 162,500 children, trained 17,000 of them in IT, taught 90,000 women in income-generation and social activism skills, and brought the joy of reading to more than 6,000,000 children.

Katha's children’s books have won recognitions, including at the Noma Concours and the Biennial of Illustration Bratislava, one of the oldest international honors for children's book illustrators.

In 2002 Katha was the winner of a NASDAQ EDUCATION AWARD and a finalist at the Stockholm Challenge. In 2009, it received a India NGO Award.
...........................................................................................................

Could you please tell us about the early days of Katha and where the organization is now?

In the very beginning we naively believed that we just had to publish good stories to realize our dreams of promoting the joy of reading. Luckily, we quickly realized that children needed to be able to learn to read first, before they could develop a love of reading.

We started working in Govindpur (then the largest slum of Delhi) in 1990, with only five children, because most of them were working and couldn't attend school. That was when we realized that, if we could get a decent income into the hands of our women [mostly heading households. In 1990, according to a government survey, earnings in Govindpuri were Rs 600-800/month/family], then we would have the moral right to ask children to go to school.

We've come a long way since then. Today we work in Delhi, Haryana and Arunachal Pradesh, through 148 learning centres in slums, streets and tribal villages; and in municipal schools. We also have a Katha Centre for Film Studies in Mumbai. And our books are available across the country !

A 2008 survey of 410 of our graduates showed that they together were earning Rs. 45 million; 15 times what their families earned then. This year, 44% of our graduates have joined college. This is a result of our women earning well to support their children’s long term plans. Today, about 1000 of our self-determined women together earn about Rs. 4.0 million a month. A cause for real celebration!

Please tell us about Katha’s successful Reading Campaign.

Katha started its reading programmes in 1988 with Tamasha!, our children’s magazine for first generation school goers. UNICEF and the Government of Delhi helped take it to Delhi’s slums, and later the Government of Rajasthan chipped in for their schoolchildren. In 1990 our schools started to nurture reading through story and storytelling. In 2001, the Tamasha Roadshow started working with street children–reading being part of their school readiness plan and to getting into formal school. Since 2004, one gaily painted van called BowWow! [Books on Wheels, Workshops on Wheels] has reached out to children. BowWow is an inducement programme that uses storytelling, theatre and art to attract at-risk children to explore the world of knowledge.

In 2008, the Delhi Government invited us to work with their schools to enhance student's reading skills. Through  an innovative Reading League concept that Katha has patented, the I LOVE READING CAMPAIGN now brings better reading skills to 100,000 children in 50 slums and 50 municipal corporation schools. Last year, to make the campaign more sustainable, we proposed a school transformation [STeP] concept to the Municipal Corporation of Delhi. With support of many partners, including UNESCO and Katha’s PACT (Principals Alliance for Creative Teaching), we now work with children and teachers to ensure that each child achieves grade-level reading. Katha's STeP fosters ownership in each municipal school.

Can you tell us more about Katha's Schools on Wheels?

Delhi has a distressingly large number of street children that grows by the day. In 2001, through the generous donation of a van by the German Embassy, we started a Schools on Wheels programme to bring quality learning to street children. Soon after we had two buses and teachers!

The Tamasha Road Show, our Schools on Wheels programme, is based on the idea that if children cannot go to school, the school should go to them. The Schools on Wheels use the power of IT to bring children out of habits like drugs and tobacco, get them into formal schools, and help them take the certification examinations, which in turn allows them to pursue their dreams of becoming doctors, computer specialists, etc. In 2009-10, we enrolled 1006 children and only 5 dropped out. Katha’s performance, attendance and retention in our Roadshows are as high as in our other schools.

Could you please describe Katha's holistic education model?

The Katha Curriculum for Life is called KREAD: Katha
Relevant Education for All-round Development. Sparked off in 1992, Katha’s holistic learning system, resting on the MeWe philosophy, has informed all our work to date. KREAD was designed to help children understand deeply the meaning of what it means to be a "good human being," someone who keeps in mind the whole of our planet and all its lifeforms. Loka samastha sukino bavanthu [May all lifeforms live in peace] is the prayer we say at Katha. Our Curriculum for Life helps a child proactively build her own sustainable future.

In our schools, KREAD is carried forward with the help of another system called S.P.I.C.E. ® (Social activism, Personal Leadership, Intellectual skills, Cultural and Environmental knowledge), a special educational framework that pushes the envelope of traditional knowledge. Our cooperative, creative classrooms celebrate inclusive learning and bring forth individual potential as they put to work ideas for a larger good through story pedagogy®, a unique model based on a 2000-year old Indian treatise on dance.

Since 2008, each trimester in our schools have been dedicated to exploring different environmental issues, including global warming and sustainable urbanization and consumption. These sound like huge topics for children. They definitely are a real challenge–even to the teachers, who sometimes come from the slums themselves and have minimal education. So we all learn genetics, mach numbers and, when the need is there, nanotechnology. Our teachers are not shy of saying “I don't know” and “Let’s find out together!”. We learn together, and it's fun.


What role would you say publishing and translation play in realizing Katha's goals?

Publishing and translation no doubt play a very big role. In order to give children access to the heterogeneity that is India, Katha’s children’s publishing programme creates a space for a culturally distinctive children’s literature that fosters healthy curiosity, dispels prejudices, counters stereotypes and helps children better understand the multilingual country and world they live in.

Stories are a vicarious way to learn more about ourselves and others, and Indian stories in translation give our children a window into a world otherwise invisible to them. We at Katha see translation as an important counter-divisive tool for nation building. That's why we created Katha Vilasam, Katha's Story Research and Resource Centre: to bring the best of Indian writing from as many as 21 languages into Hindi and English. The Katha World Library links children to world cultures.


What are some of your most popular titles and how are your books distributed?

We seem to have quite a few books that are firm favourites with children, including Autorickshaw Blues, Song of a Scarecrow, The Famous Smile, Pokiri Parrot, The Princess with the Longest Hair. Recent releases like Dinosaur Long-As-127 Kids, Mai and Her Friends, Days with Thathu have also been earning some rave reviews.

Katha books are distributed through trade and direct channels; organizations working in field of education like Pratham, Room to Read, Eklavya etc; as well as government library chains and India’s Education for All initiative, which is working to fulfill the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. We also participate in major book fairs.

Facilitating Katha’s" literacy to literature continuum" is our latest venture,  the Katha StoryShop. Probably the first children's bookshop In Delhi, Katha StoryShop offers, in addition to books, beautifully handcrafted products by women and children, to support Katha’s slum resurgence initiative; net proceeds from sales go back to the artisans and craftspeople.

What would you say are the biggest challenges Katha faces as a non-profit in the area of formal and non-formal education in India?

There are many lacunae that have long affected India when it comes to children. One of the main challenges we face as an educational non-profit is finding ways to meet the growing need for quality education in the ever-growing slums (in Delhi 50% of the population lives in slums).

We all know that today’s pre-schooler will be India’s wealth maker in 2030, yet quality education for 0-6 year olds living in poverty eludes us. We do not have enough pre-schools for them all.

Finding and keeping long term donor partners is also a very big challenge.

None of the many challenges our country faces can be met by non-profits alone. We need governments to help us, and we need people to make government work. That's why Katha works closely with governments. Our reading campaigns are supported by the Government of India and the Delhi Government (we are currently involved in a 2-year action-research to help develop a roadmap for education in Delhi), and I am part of deliberations and consultations at both Delhi and Government of India to help create policy changes in areas related to children.

What are your hopes for the future of Katha?

We hope to continue helping families, especially women, to bring themselves out of poverty through sustainable and innovative ways, so that their children can go to school and stay in the education continuum long enough to have a good education. We want all children to have a chance to develop a love of reading and to learn about the importance of protecting our earth, being socially just, etc.

I dream of a day when all our children will go to school regardless of which side of the many divides they are on. I want to see teacher education programmes supporting the many teachers in our slums and villages, so all children can learn and stay in school until grade 12. This is the only way we can positively impact poverty alleviation and work toward social justice. We must take brave new steps to bring quality into early learning and to develop literacy initiatives of greater resonance. Publishing is part of this larger vision.

Culturelinking is especially important in India for we have a huge child and youth population. Many are the issues and challenges that we need to think and synergize on for action. Our cultures are ancient and must be seen as intergenerational gifts. We hope that Katha’s work, be it in education or in publishing, will continue to help build this diversity and plurality.

*Aline Pereira is PaperTigers' Managing Editor and Producer

Posted November 2010

back to top

about us | newsletter & privacy policy | downloads | site map | search | testimonials | disclaimer

home | outreach | blog
©2001-2011 Pacific Rim Voices