How A Bureaucrat's Childhood Memory Led To A Literacy Revolution Touching Over 16 Million Children

India.com

4 days ago

New Delhi: It started with a question that stayed long after the files were signed, the speeches were made and the transfers were ordered. Somewhere in the Bodo-dominated interiors of Assam in 1986, a young IAS officer named Dhir Jhingran noticed something that tugged harder than routine ever could – children sitting silently in classrooms and lost in a language they did not understand.
He was then district magistrate in Kokrajhar, a region shaken by conflict and instability in Assam. There was no Right to Education law back then. But to Jhingran, the idea that a child could be in school and still not learn felt like a breach of something sacred.
That quiet discomfort would travel with him for decades. It would later take the form of the Language and Learning Foundation (LLF) – a movement now reshaping India's literacy landscape. Since 2015, the LLF has reached over 14.2 lakh children directly and impacted more than 1.6 crore through materials designed to unlock learning in the languages they know best.
A Classroom Comes Alive in Varanasi
In the primary school of Koirajpur, Uttar Pradesh, teacher Smita Chaturvedi remembers the days when her blackboard felt more like a wall. Students showed up, nodded through definitions, recited textbook lines and left the classroom behind, both physically and emotionally.
Things shifted when her school partnered with the LLF. She was given workbooks and guides that invited curiosity. Flashcards, cue-based games, storytelling techniques and posters – all in sync with how young minds play, feel and understand.
Three years in, her classroom does not sound like a classroom. It sounds like a place where children belong.
'The stories are on the walls now. The kids do not wait to be told, they begin learning the moment they walk in,' she said.
Sapna Spoke, The Class Listened
In Haryana, a girl named Sapna sat quietly for weeks after enrolling. She was seven. Her mother tongue was a Punjabi dialect her teachers did not speak. She was not slow and shy. She did not understand what the adults around her were saying.
Trained under LLF's multilingual approach, her teacher began teaching concepts in Sapna's home language – not permanently, just as a bridge. It gave her enough confidence to cross over. Today, Sapna is the child who raises her hand first.
The Experiment That Started It All
Kokrajhar was burning when Jhingran was first posted there. Ethnic tensions had turned violent. But amid the conflict, he discovered something unexpected – a dormant hunger for education. Parents wanted learning. Even inside refugee camps.
The solution was not more policing. It was books. Volunteers. Hope. He helped launch an adult literacy campaign across the district. Over 3,000 local youth, mostly women, became teachers overnight. They taught adults to read, to write, to count and, somewhere in the process, to heal.
Tribal songs echoed in makeshift classrooms. Community peace meetings replaced armed stand-offs. Within nine months, the district had turned a corner.
The experiment worked. Literacy did not follow peace. It created it.
Language as a Lifeline, Not a Luxury
A large number of Indian children still start school in a language they do not speak at home. They listen. They copy. They pass. But they do not understand. And when comprehension breaks, confidence collapses.
This mismatch often pushes children to drop out silently. LLF's work builds a bridge between home languages and school languages. Its programmes help children transition into reading and writing while preserving what they already know.
Three Tools, One Mission
LLF's model rests on three pillars:
Teacher training – intensive workshops, online courses and regular support for educators.
Government collaboration – formal partnerships with seven states, including Assam, Jharkhand, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh.
Teaching materials – custom handbooks, daily lesson plans and bilingual workbooks that reach the child in her own voice.
One Memory Stayed
Jhingran spent years at the Ministry of Human Resource Development. He coordinated primary education programmes in eight states. He was advisor to the UNICEF, helped Nepal restructure its education policy and still chose to return to the grassroots. To start from scratch.
In every workshop, every workbook and every smile of a child who finally understands a poem, the memory of Kokrajhar lives on.
'I remember those children. They sat in silence for so long. I do not want any child in this country to feel that silence again,' he says.
And just like that, from a forgotten district in Assam, a revolution was born – not to make children study harder, but to make them feel heard.