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goal is to create a conversation around how South Asia can end poverty in a generation.

Last year an article appeared on their site that asked the question:

How do you go from a rural India in 2006 in which:
- close to half the children in grade 1 could not recognize numbers or letters
- almost half the children in grade 2 could not read a grade 1-level text fluently or do a 2-digit subtraction problem confidently

- about half the children in grade 5 could not read a grade 2-level text easily or do a simple division problem

to a situation by 2009 in which:
- all grade 1 children know at least the alphabet and numbers
- all grade 2 children can read at least simple words and do simple sums
- all grades 3-5 children can at least read simple texts fluently and solve arithmetic problems confidently

And do it for a target population of almost a 100 million children?

The article goes on to focus primarily on an initiative called Read India that was launched by Pratham, a nonprofit organization devoted to the education and literacy of India's children. I have written about Pratham in my book as well:

When families struggle to feed themselves and even clean water remains painfully scarce, education plays a minimal, too often expendable, role to many of India's poor. Organizations like Pratham employ a preventative approach to decrease the vulnerability of children living in such poverty to ending up on the streets, trafficked or in child labor. Originally parented by UNICEF in 1994, Pratham began in Mumbai slums where the learning program reaches about thirty thousand children each year with literacy efforts, preschools, computer classes and teacher training. It quickly expanded to Delhi and other cities, launching a nationwide program called Read India in 2002 with a mission of "every child in school and learning well."

An incident in a Delhi slum called Zakhira demonstrates the difficulty that children living in these areas often face just getting to school. Zakhira is an illegal shantytown balanced precariously and dangerously in a triangle formed between three train tracks. Trash and defecation clog the tracks where trains speed by mere feet from corroding tin and plastic homes. Not long ago a young child was run over and killed by a train as he followed his mother to school. When the police came, the grieving mother had to deny the child was hers to avoid prosecution for endangering the lives of passengers on the train.

Other students must cross these very same tracks to attend

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