Akshar Bharati Celebrates 16 years of spreading joy through reading

19 April 2007, Akshay Tritiya, was the day when we started on the journey of spreading joy through reading. We call this journey Akshar Bharati.?

Inspired by APJ Abdul Kalam’s call of making India a developed country, ruminating on Song of Youth, a bunch of software engineers embarked on this journey of setting up community libraries, and spreading the joy of reading.

Wow, It has been 16 years, but it did not feel that way. We have helped in setting up libraries in 1500+ schools/communities. In this process, we have enabled about 300,000 children with access to books and donated about 600,000 books.

In the year 2016, we also started introducing computer education to children by the mean of direct computer experience. We have trained 110,000 children in the last 7 years.

This journey has taken us to interact with a large number of children, volunteers, teachers, and CSR partners. We have many companies supporting this cause over many years, some of the key CSR partners are LTI Mindtree, BNY Melon, Symantec, Seagate, Druva, Cohesity, VMware, Cisco, Nvidia, etc. This list is not exhaustive. We would like to take this opportunity to thank each one of our partners.

Even after working for the last 16 years, we still felt that there is still something missing.? We have observed that book reading has some inherent challenges. One might find an interesting book, read it (partially or fully), and put it back. But there are few opportunities to connect with others interested in reading, have conversations about books, discover new books, and discover new perspectives. It makes book reading a bit of a lonely activity.

We have recently started a new experiment at Akshar Bharati called Akshar Bharati reading club (ABRC). We believe we have found a simple and very effective method to solve this problem. We have been receiving great success with this new ABRC model. Here is the ABRC model:

• The reading club members meet once a week or once every alternate week,?
• We identify 2 to 4 volunteers for each meeting. Each volunteer prepares a discussion on one book.?
• There is no expectation for other members to read the book for the club meeting. Idea is that in each meeting everyone discovers 2 or 4 books.
• Club members discover 50 to 100 books per year.
• We are running a few clubs on this model in companies and housing societies.
• We are running these cubs in 20 schools in Pune's urban and rural areas with 4000 children.

This has been a wonderful experience, we have been discovering all kinds of books here, from Atomic Habits, Siddartha, Guide from RK, Subhas Chandra Bose books, Param veer Chakra, Mystery book, etc. We can go on and on.

If you are interested in reading or as a teacher and parent believe that your children might be interested in reading, then you should be part of ABRC.?

ABRC can get started in various schools, communities, and companies. We are also starting a few open virtual reading clubs, for different age groups and languages. If you are interested in joining this initiative, please fill in the following form:?

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1kiIp8qDObi2uM4SrFohLEN5qB786xVjLt8xAR_LZo14/prefill

Regards,

Team Akshar Bharati