The Kahani Project

The Hindi word ‘Kahani’ means ‘story’ in English. The Kahani Project was born out of the desire to enable visually challenged children access the rich world of stories in global children’s literature in the same way that it is available to other mainstream children. There are only a few books published in Braille and very few children know how to read the language of dots.

To answer was to use live storytelling in local communities. In 2012, a pilot project took off at the Poona School and Home for Blind Boys (Koregaon Park, Pune) and in the three years since then, the project has reached over 200 visually challenged children in the city.

Since then, the Kahani Project’s objective evolved to include children from a variety of contexts, all on the fringes of the storytelling community. Now it uses storytelling to engage with the community to promote education and all-round community well-being.

In the last 12 months alone (between Sept, 2014 and Aug 2015), the The Kahani Project website (thekahaniproject. org) has received over 70,000 views, engaging more than 41,000 users the world over.

The stories hosted by The Kahani Project on SoundCloud have been played 13,000 times. The listeners are spread across six continents with the highest number of visits from the United States (2,299), Pakistan (549), United Kingdom (393), France (279) and the United Arab Emirates (208) besides India (6,933). Listeners downloaded from the site 1,900 times. Stories are available on the site in 9 Indian languages.

The project uses crowd sourcing to generate audio material. Many of the 400+ stories hosted on SoundCloud and The Kahani Project website have been recorded by volunteers all around the world who record stories from the comfort of their homes or participate in Storythons organised by the project organisers.