Shekhar discovers an ongoing campaign:

To find out the answer, I recently took a trip to Meerut District in Uttar Pradesh with Ashish Sharma and Nuzhat Mallik of the education NGO, Pratham. It is a bright, hot August day. As we turn the corner between narrow rows of small, roughly built houses, we are immediately sucked into a symphony of singing and movement. Some 40 children are following the lead of a young man who is calling out the words of a Hindi song about an elephant and acting out its actions. The faces of the children are radiant; the energy is palpable. Not the sort of thing I would associate with government schools. This is Pratham’s Read India campaign at work.