Meet a Sandbox member: Nirav Shah
Name: Nirav Shah
Location: Pondicherry, India
Activity: Social Entrepreneur
What is your main occupation?
I am the COO of 2 companies namely PlanetRead and BookBox. PlanetRead is a not for profit organization with the simple vision of a reading planet. We contribute to literacy worldwide by innovating and implementing simple, scalable, and cost-effective solutions, especially using mass media and information technologies. PlanetRead pioneered the concept of “Same-Language Subtitling” (SLS) for mass literacy, by suggesting its implementation on the immensely popular Bollywood film songs on TV in India. SLS is already on several song-based TV programs on Doordarshan, India’s national broadcaster. This “karaoke” approach to literacy provides automatic and regular reading practice to over 200 million early-literates in India, these people who are officially “literate” but who cannot read, for example, the headlines of a newspaper.
BookBox is a social enterprise that innovated the concept of ‘AniBooks’ or animated books to support early literacy and language skills. Our vision is: “A ‘book’ for every child in his/her language. We overcome the distribution challenges of print by piping reading to children on digital and electronic media. AniBooks flow from a simple fact – children love to watch cartoons. Thus, AniBooks are animated stories for children, with the narration appearing on-screen as Same Language Subtitles (SLS). Every word is highlighted in perfect timing with the audio, reinforcing weak reading skills, automatically and subconsciously. BookBox’s focus is very clearly on children between the age of 4 and 14. AniBooks are already available as internet downloads, print books, CD, VCD, DVD and mobile phones. And there is potential for more!
Where do you see yourself in 5 years? What are your plans?
In five years, we plan to scale up to the extent that both PlanetRead and BookBox become synonymous for reading skills & literacy development at a global level.
At PlanetRead, we plan to focus on regions with high levels of illiteracy like South Asia (India, Pakistan and Bangladesh) and Africa. One of our major goals is to get a policy mandate for SLS on every song-based programme on TV, in all languages and states of India.
At BookBox, create TV programmes with BookBox content, bringing reading to millions of children in their own language(s).Our goal is to reach every possible touch point. Our content is also suitable for TV broadcast for which we are currently exploring partnerships with DTH (Direct to Home) operators. We also plan to get into airline in-flight entertainment.
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