Mobile telephony facilitates rural literacy in India

Briefly describes the demonstration of the application of mobile telephony to enable access to and delivery of literacy to vast numbers of rural children in India. The thee projects (MILLEE, Idea Cellular, AKSHYA) briefly described here have as one of their laudable social objectives “Education for All”. The mobile learning and teaching strategy offers an affordable solution to overcome or bypass the several barriers and obstacles to deliver learning to rural children. With the extension of broadband and 3-G facilities to cover rural areas the rural literacy will receive a great push. The co-creation of content is stressed: teachers familiar with the specific rural environment, parents, and elders in the rural area, people with local language competence, social-anthropologists, and others concerned with development of rural children should collaborate with the technical personnel, image creators and media artists in co-creating innovative, relevant lessons and messages for delivery to the rural children.