Each child can read: A beginning or an end

Every teacher, student and parent believes that reading is the most significant skill developed in elementary schools. To find the number of students who face difficulty in reading may be a point of debate, but one thing that everyone will be agreed to is the fact that a big percentage of students not only in India but also in the world are poor readers. Irrespective of the definition of a poor reader, there is a very high percentage of poor readers in our society. Incapability of reading is to a great extent, the most important reason that students are not growing academically according to their level or class, required to be provided special education or provided remedial classes. Among the students who are poor readers, there is a further gap between students from different geographical areas and genetic groups. These gaps and differences in reading skill have major consequences for our system and society, as they progressively lead to differences among Indian students that remain throughout their student life and even beyond that. The reading problem of Indian students is not new. Overall performance in reading has been more or less same since “National Policy of Education 1968”. The thinking that we can return to some earlier"golden age of reading" is wrong. The purpose of this article is to study the effectiveness of the campaign titled “Each child can read” being run by the Government of NCT of Delhi to improve the reading skill among students of the government schools of Delhi.