VELLORE: In a pioneering initiative, the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) in association with Aid India and the Tamil Nadu Science Forum (TNSF) has kick started a four-month Tamil fluency programme called Padippum Inikkum in the five districts of Northern Tamil Nadu.

The objective of this programme is to enhance the Tamil reading skills of primary school students in classes III to V, involving activity-based education kits and posters prepared by the NGO, Aid India.

The first phase of the programme aims to take the Padippum Inikkum programme to over seven lakh students in 6,500 government and government-aided primary schools in Vellore, Tiruvannamalai, Kancheepuram, Krishnagiri and Tiruvallur districts at a cost of Rs 50 lakh, said D Rosario Raja Kumar, Vellore district Programme Co-ordinator, SSA.

The second phase of the programme would benefit as many as 13 lakh people in the other districts.

Why Tamil? The survey conducted by the SSA and Annual Status on Education Report by an NGO, PRATHAM in Tamil Nadu in 2005-06, revealed that around 50 percent of primary school students were not fluent in reading Tamil.

“Fluency in Tamil is important to understand other subjects better,” said, Balaji Sampath, secretary, Aid India.

As a first step, as many as 8,000 teachers and headmasters in the five districts were trained to divide students into four groups based on their Tamil reading standards.

For instance, in Kaniyambadi block in Vellore district, as many as 4,719 students from 64 schools were selected for the Tamil fluency programme by 143 trained teachers, said Gopala Rajendran, Supervisor, Block Resource Centre, (BRC) Kaniyambadi. Similarly, the students in the 20 BRCs in the district were also being being divided into groups. The process would be completed in a week, he added.

The students who can not read alphabets, words, sentences and paragraphs are divided into primary, stage I, II, III and IV respectively for training.

“This ensures learning is a joyful experience for students and gives them special attention,” said S Kumaran, district co-ordinator, TNSF, adding “At each stage around 10 exercises using pictographic story, cards, colour posters, word puzzle, games will be used to induce interest to learn Tamil.”

The methodology used for this project was already tested in 182 schools in the two blocks of Tiruvannamalai and Kancheepuram, district, where it was found effective, because 89 percent of students acquired fluency in the language within two months, said Sampath.