Interview with Manisha Chaudhry, Head of Content Development of Pratham Books
by Aline Pereira*

Established in 2004, Pratham Books is a non-profit trust that publishes high quality children's books at affordable prices and in multiple Indian languages. Pratham Books
is one of the arms of Pratham.org, the largest non-profit organization in the area of primary education in India. Their programs have reached over a million children to date, in 13 states.

In 2008 Pratham Books received two awards for Excellence in Book Production by the Federation of Indian Publishers.

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Would you please start by telling us how Pratham  Books came about and what its mission is?

Pratham, our parent company, is a non-profit that has been working in the field of primary education for 18 years and is now active in 21 states of the country. It works through various programmes with municipal and government school-age children in classes 1-5. The focus is on quality enhancement and improving the educational journey of the child.

Books and reading are an important part of Pratham’s work, and Pratham Books was born in 2004 as a result of this. There is a real dearth of attractive and good books for children in Indian languages and Pratham Books was set up to create such books. Our mission is a book in every child’s hand and we want to reach the last child, the child who is under-served, the child who has reached school and is reading but needs fun books so that she becomes a reader for life.

We publish books in 11 Indian languages for children 3-14 years of age and have over 170 original titles. All our books have excellent production values and are developed keeping the Indian context in focus.

For those not familiar with Pratham Books' “Read India” imprint, how would you describe it? What are some of the new and upcoming "Read India" titles?

In one word: FUN. Our books are created keeping the child at the centre of interest. They are colourful, printed on good paper, always beautifully illustrated. They span a range of genres and subject areas such as picture books, fiction for the young, information, history, science and books based on photographs. They inform and delight at the same time and have no moralistic overload. They touch the heart and please the eye.

We have just released a collection of Japanese Folktales called Grandpa Cherry Blossom and other folktales from Japan retold by Hema Pande and illustrated by well-known Japanese artist Keiko Tsuji.

We have a photographic book on the river Narmada releasing soon. A universally appealing tale from Germany called Lenny and Tweek: Wanted: A Friend is going to press as are about 15 other books.

Would you tell us about some of the joint literacy initiatives you have been involved with?

We support literacy initiatives through providing material that is attractive, appropriate and affordable. We work with organizations such as Pratham, Room to Read, UNICEF, state government programmes, and the Sarv Shiksha Abhiyan (“Education for All”, a flagship programme of the Government of India).

In 2008, we were among the publishers whose titles were purchased by nearly 70,000 government schools in Bihar for Reading Enhancement for classes 1 and 2. This was an initiative of the Bihar government called the Bodhi Vriksha Karyakram.Twenty of our chosen titles and 20 story cards reached millions of young children.

The Kendriya Vidayalaya Sangathan (an organization administering 981 schools in India) has chosen 36 of our books for all their libraries across India.

There are numerous such examples of our work to connect literacy and the ‘literary’. We believe we are seeding the ground for a new generation of potential readers.

What would you say are the biggest challenges you face as a non-profit in the area of primary education in India?

We have many challenges almost on a daily basis, but very often they don’t feel as daunting as this sounds! This is because we believe in what we are doing.
A big challenge is to publish more books every year as children hungry for books can devour them at an astonishing speed. Another related challenge is to create the best books in each language. Good translations are not easy to come by so we are always working on improving quality. Indian language fonts also pose a production challenge and every language version has to be checked and rechecked.

Maintaining our low-price lines is also difficult as production costs are always going up. The mainstream distribution network as well as retail models work on a system of discounts that we can’t afford.

Another challenge is overcoming the general apathy towards books and reading. Most teachers and parents have to be persuaded to let their children have books to touch, feel, hold, smell and read in peace.

How are your books distributed?

Our books are distributed through various agencies working in the field of education. Some of them are NGOs such as Pratham and Room to Read; others may be government or international agencies such as UNICEF. Many school chains such as Educomp and iDiscoveri buy our books. We participate in regional, national and international book fairs. Many book shops across the country also stock our books and some orders come via the internet from across the globe. You will find our books in places as far apart as Japan and Kenya!

Pratham’s social publishing strategy has recently won the India Social Case Challenge in the Long-term Initiatives category. Can you tell us about that?

Since 2004, we have published and shipped over 8 million books, and 10 million storycards and have reached over 8 million children. While that in itself probably qualifies us as one of India's largest children's book publishers, in the context of over 300 million children in India it is still a minuscule effort. With our social publishing strategy, what we seek to achieve is to catalyse the creation of content and distribution pathways and to be more inclusive. By increasing the number of books under Creative Commons licenses, we are able to reach more children through new mediums and, what’s more, meet our objectives of inclusiveness. Our books have been converted into Braille and DAISY formats, recorded into audio books for the blind, translated into languages we do not publish, converted into iPad applications and so on.

Reading is fundamentally a social activity, so an important element in our strategy is building a community around our mission. We believe that as a publisher we should provide platforms for people to form communities and to enable co-creation of content while serving the role of curators, highlighting the new content resulting from these collaborative projects.

Pratham recently organized a ‘Blogathon’ on the occasion of the release of Ritu’s Letter Gets Longer, by Mala Kumar. Could you tell us more about that?

Pratham Books wanted to engage bloggers and book lovers in a bit of spontaneous fun and at the same time do a spot of writing. What we did was have the author of the book, Mala Kumar, start the introductory paragraph and then encouraged our community to continue the letter.
And continue they did! Mala then wrote the concluding paragraph.

We were surprised not just by the creativity that went into the writing, but also by the speed with which people were logging in and adding to the letter! From a simple letter from a little girl to her cousin, the letter turned into an intriguing one about blue tigers and mangoes and ...well, you can read it all here. Nearly sixty paragraphs got added to the original one, making Ritu's letter really long and interesting.

Ten lucky winners received a signed copy of the book. We asked two kids who were playing at a construction site near our office to pick the winners’ names.

What has been Pratham’s involvement with the Bookaroo Children’s Literature Festival?

Pratham Books was one of the key organizers of the original Bookaroo Festival, held in Delhi in 2008. Bookaroo 2008 was the first-ever Children’s Literature Festival in India.

The Bookaroo in the City component of this annual festival is entirely organized by Pratham Books in association with Delhi Pratham. I also happen to be one of the Trustees of Bookaroo Trust.

Bookaroo was an idea waiting to happen. It was an excellent platform to create a buzz around reading and books. It brought children and books together and also gave children a chance to interact with authors, illustrators, storytellers and in a relaxed way. Publishers of children’s books saw it as an opportunity to showcase their ‘star’ books and authors.

Pratham Books’ involvement in the festival ensures that it does not turn into an English-centric event, as many fun Hindi-language events are organized in municipal schools. We bring authors and artists to schools, carry the magic of books into classrooms, organize other book-related events, and more. The festival also allows visitors to become aware of our range of multi-lingual books as well as our mission.

Indian publishers have been criticized in the past for putting out only safe titles, such as retellings of traditional stories and animal tales that impart life lessons and morals. From where you stand, how would you describe the breadth and depth of India’s children’s and YA literature nowadays?

From where we stand, we see a rainbow-coloured horizon.

Children’s publishing in India is poised for growth in every way. With education becoming a priority area, the demand for books for the growing population of young people can only go up.

Traditional retellings have been staple fare for publishers for their very small children’s lists as they are ‘safe’ and they don’t have to worry about copyright. More publishers are becoming willing to publish new authors, experiment with new formats, and find synergy with other media that are competing for the mind- space of the urban child. Maybe future books will be inspired by gaming and more merchandise will be inspired by books. Marketing will remain important in creating a positive buzz around books and reading. Books will influence TV and films and in turn be influenced by them. Comics and graphic formats seem poised for the great leap forward. Young Adult Fiction will have a permeable boundary with Adult Fiction.

Production standards for children’s books will improve as there will be greater exposure to well-produced books world-wide. The internet will create new ways to read and share and peer-review books. It may also enable many new talents to emerge as more people will be able to put up their work online.

From where we stand, we have to make sure that our Indian languages participate fully in this process. We have a distinctive ‘Indian’ presence and we want the reader in Indian languages to pass effortlessly from the echoing corridors of our oral tradition to a space where there are enough books to choose from, ranging from her grandmother’s tales to science fiction.

What are your hopes for the future of Pratham?

We hope to bring out a list with even greater variety. We hope we will work in more languages. We hope there will be many more authors and organizations who will be willing to publish more books with us and allow us to put them on Creative Commons so that our content is used in the most creative way. We'd like to experiment with different formats and make our books accessible to the greatest number of children.

*Aline Pereira is PaperTigers' Managing Editor and Producer

Posted October 2010

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