 A child without education is like a bird without wings. You do not want to deny children the opportunity to a better life. Education is that basic right that every individual deserves. In India, we have an electricity rate of 74%. You have close to 250 to 300 million people who are not educated. If you look at the enrollment data, it's really very high, 95%. But if you look at the learning outcomes, it's really low. That means a lot of the students are going, but they are not learning anything. Even if the teacher is motivated and the teachers do turn up, they do not have good content available. You know, I don't want to sound an alarm, but really every day we waste. Some child is dropping out of school, then becoming adults. They are getting married, having children, and the vicious cycle of poverty continues. We needed to make sure that we bring a sense of urgency of development to solve the global learning crisis. It's our moral duty to contribute back to the society. And this project was an opportunity for us to give back to the society. As a company and personally I have been focused on a lot of the education related efforts. So when I heard about global learning XPRIZE, I was obviously intrigued. We were trying to come up with different alternatives to see how we can help society. But we were limited by the small solutions that we had. I've been working with two of the largest nonprofits that work in the early foundational learning space. The first one is Pratham, the second one is Ekal. And when I was working with them, I realized that really the problem they're trying to solve is beyond any nonprofits or for-profits' ability to solve. It became obvious to me that by using technology that is released by Global Learning XPRIZE, we could accelerate some of their efforts. The reason that we went with Global Learning XPRIZE is we know that it is from the best team members across the globe and it has proven results. The goal was that this software should be made freely available so that any independent developer can extend it to their communities. So there were two primary challenges that we were trying to solve. One was making it accessible to as many people as possible and maintaining the quality of these applications. The model that Global Learning XPRIZE followed was that the teams would publish this software. It was available in a local storage device. And then in Tanzania, these applications would be used or picked up from that storage device. But that model would not be scalable in a country like India. We thought we'll publish these applications onto Google Play Store and in order to make these applications compliant with Google Play Store, there are several tweaks that we had to do. For example, these applications are very huge. It has a lot of media content, videos, stories, audio files. So we started compressing some of these files so that the size is reduced. We evaluated these applications to remove unused files. Some of these applications had multiple independent applications. Now that is not an easy user experience. As a parent who's not very educated will not be comfortable installing multiple applications. So we bundled all these applications as one. We've considerably simplified the process of making these applications available in different languages. So localization is easy. Localization, what it mainly focuses on is how to get the concept into the local culture. We wanted to localize in four different languages. We started with Hindi as the first language. Then we went on to Urdu, then we went on to Bangla. So we were able to quickly move around with different languages. So I was really excited when I received this opportunity to translate the English content into Bengali content. And while translating the content, we really kept in mind these few points in terms of native usage. Easy to understand for the child and really intuitive. It took me back to my childhood and Bengali is such a sweet language. I really miss interacting in Bengali now that I'm based out of Mumbai. But really going back to the roots, listening to the words, thinking about those words, framing those sentences. And also looking at it from a child's eye. Really what is it that they liked? I also went back home to my friends' neighbors and spoke with their children to understand what is it that excites them. How do they use the language? Language has changed since we were children and tried to bring in those elements here. We reached out to our employees and we asked them that if they can install these applications with their extended family, in their communities, with their children. And we got a lot of feedback from them. So one of the examples could be something like this word is too complicated. My child does not understand that. Can you simplify that? Or for my child, a pancake does not make sense. Can you use a dosa instead? Or a roti instead? So contextualizing or localizing to our context. When you localize content especially, it cannot be a literal translation. We have to keep in mind the nuances of that language, the beauty of that language. Each language has a melody. Each language has a tone to it. So if we can keep those simple things in mind, I think that will help in terms of translation and what connects with the hearts of the audience. We also tweaked certain words based on how it sounded so that it was more intuitive to them and the entire experience from just seeing it in the app and understanding the user experience of a child was really exciting. I was one of the developers who worked on localizing the applications into different languages. So we identified all those assets which need to be converted into the local languages. Then we used artificial intelligence and machine learning services so that we can automate the process to convert the audio files or the video files into the local language. We converted all the audio files into text files. Anyone who is trying to localize it into their own language, they can just use some translation services and some ML services to translate the transcripts into their local language and then convert them into audio files. So this would make the process very easy for the future developers or the community members. Once people start exploring or understanding the code to localize the software, they'll understand that it's not really that complicated. Most of the application should work with minimal changes. If you're still facing issues, you always have the community forum. The students that we are trying to target, they really don't have access to quality hardware. So we work with some of these nonprofits to source the tablets that could be deployed in the field. So now we have several thousand tablets that are deployed to students in rural parts of India. The biggest barrier we have seen was availability of electricity and internet. In the last few years, both of these infrastructure-related resources are now far more easily available as compared to previous years. Now with internet, we are able to update the content, update the applications and make all of these resources available to the children at far more remote places. The response, the engagement from our students is very high and to our surprise, really they keep coming back to it because they find it engaging. They have more free-form learning. It covers the whole lot of areas all the way from reading to basically arithmetic as well as playing games. So by using some of these tools, we think that we can move the needle. This is the cost-effective way for us to reach the children our teachers are not able to reach. Every child should have right to education. Without education, we see that they will be handicapped and when we talk about the future of the society, getting access to all these resources at an early age is very important. Education is a great equalizer. That is how I got to where I am. If it wasn't for my education or the opportunities I got to educate myself, I wouldn't be where I am. And I want to make sure that every child has access to quality education and this is one way of reaching them. There is a lot of apprehension around how and where technology is going and I think Global Learning Express software is showing us what is really possible with some of these technologies. Not everyone in this world is really fortunate to have the means to get an education. Education takes the society forward. I truly, truly believe in that. That is the light that will change the mindset of people. So giving children that opportunity where they can learn on their own, where schools are scarce and teachers may not be available, give them the right means and they will learn it. Making that difference, being a small part of this entire big vision, I'm grateful for it. I would like to invite developers, development teams, leaders, philanthropists in other countries, other communities to take the great software platform that XPRI's team has released to the world funding by the large benefactors including Mr. Elon Musk and take it to their communities. Within MQ software, we have worked really hard to make sure that the source code is easily available to all developers. It's on GitHub. They can take it, they can download it, they can customize it. I would strongly encourage that these applications are localized to as many languages as possible and give each and every child an opportunity to learn. So I urge all of you, I appeal to all of you to take this forward and really make a difference in the lives of children.