Newspaper in early education
-Hindustan Times’ initiative to print
beginner’s textbook within the newspaper
As a part of the campaign ‘You Read, They Learn’ (YRTL), a year-long initiative to help educate underprivileged children launched initially in Delhi-NCR on April 18, 2012 Hindustan Times has committed to contributing five paise from every Metro Copy in Delhi-NCR. To build on that initiative, the newspaper printed/included a beginner’s textbook in every copy of the newspaper in the region.
In line with the initiative’s mission to help educate underprivileged children, every page of the newspaper included a page of a textbook. Following three simple steps, readers could cut out these pages, stapled them together to form a textbook and then shared it with an underprivileged child. In addition, there were textbooks inserted in copies of Mint and Hindustan circulated in the rigion. Through this simple and powerful idea, readers were able to reach out to over one million children on a single day and helped them take their first step towards education.
“The text book is one of our initiatives to help readers join the ‘You Read, They Learn’ campaign by sharing it with needy children or even using it to help someone learn the alphabet. We are committed to ensuring that the YRTL initiative addresses the nation’s urgent need of raising its literacy level,” said Sanjoy Narayan, editor-in-chief, Hindustan Times.
“We have had great response to the ‘You Read, They Learn’ initiative launched recently, and wanted to enable each of our readers to take their own first step towards helping someone get education. And we wanted to make a tangible impact in the shortest span of time. We decided that doing something in the paper could achieve both, and hence the idea of a beginner textbook which could be cut out and given. But for us, it’s just the beginning of a movement to bring about positive change,” stated Shantanu Bhanja, vice-president, marketing, HT Media Limited.
HT Media Limited is one of India’s foremost media companies, and home to three leading newspapers in the country in the English, Hindi and Business news segments – Hindustan Times (English daily), Hindustan (Hindi daily, through a subsidiary) and Mint (business daily). Hindustan Times was started in 1924 and has a more than an 85-year history as one of India’s leading newspapers.
