Rohini Nilekani pours her wealth into getting books to India's poorest children

Pratham Books uses Creative Commons licensing to make its books more accessible. CC allows anyone to use, tweak, rewrite, and translate Pratham Books, most of which are freely available on the Internet through sites such as Scribd and Flickr. Good professional translators are difficult to find in a country with so many languages. With CC, translators are free to use Pratham Books's content and create versions in their own languages.

"When it comes to learning, why put it behind walls?" Nilekani says. "Everything does not have to be a commodity."

This free sharing of content has already created a bevy of new products, such as audio versions for blind readers, versions for iPads, and books in regional languages. Pratham is also active on social media, which is helping it to gather an army of volunteers. On Sept. 8, International Literacy Day, it held a storytelling day in which 250 storytelling "champions" across India read the same book to children.

Pratham's next task is to "scale up" to face the huge challenges that remain and continue to rethink how books can be used or shared, Nilekani says. "Knowledge is still kept under wraps in India: We must open it up."

Ms. Sen Gupta sums up what keeps the Pratham family going.

"Once, after doing two sessions with a bunch of kids, I was getting my breath back by sitting on a bench when they were all going past," she says. "One boy patted my shoulder and said with aplomb, 'Bahut mazaa aya! (It was great fun!).' Then I got patted by about a hundred kids with loud 'thank-yous.' It felt like they had pinned a medal to my chest.

"That is what Pratham does. [It] brings the joy of stories and imagination into the lives of kids who have so little of that."

• To learn more, visit www.prathambooks.org.

Ways you can help

UniversalGiving helps people give to and volunteer for top-performing charitable organizations worldwide. Projects are vetted by UniversalGiving; 100 percent of each donation goes directly to the listed cause.

Here are three opportunities, selected by UniversalGiving, to donate or volunteer:

• Benetech’s Bookshare dramatically increases access to books for people with print reading disabilities. Project: Donate to a digital library for people with print disabilities.

• Corazon Roxas assists groups that provide education to children in developing countries. Project: Give four bags of reading books to a school in a remote village.

• Cross-Cultural Solutions operates volunteer programs around the world. Project: Volunteer to teach and care for orphans in India.

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