On a Tuesday morning inside a free school run by a non-profit in the tribal belt of Madhya Pradesh, a teacher paused midway through a story and looked around her classroom in disbelief.

Thirty children who usually struggled to sit still were listening with complete attention.

Not one child was fidgeting. Nobody was trying to leave the room. The classroom, usually noisy and distracted, had fallen into what the teacher would later describe as “pin-drop silence”.

For her, the moment felt extraordinary because she remembered what the same children had been like a year earlier.

“When Turning Pages Foundation first came, some children threw books around,” she recalls. “Some walked out. They were not interested at all. But now they wait for story sessions.”

The transformation is part of a larger reading movement quietly unfolding across India through Turning Pages Foundation, a non-profit that works with a mix of government, government-aided, free schools and low-income schools that aid underserved communities to build strong reading habits among children from Classes 1 to 5.

Founded by sisters Bunty and Madhuri Pai, and their first cousin Nayana Pai, the organisation works across 12 active schools in Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Madhya Pradesh. 

Through classroom libraries, read-aloud sessions, teacher training, and school-wide reading programmes, it currently reaches nearly 8,000 students and 150 teachers. Over the last few years, the foundation has sourced and circulated close to 15,000 books across schools that often had little or no access to children’s literature before the programme began.

But for the founders, the work is not just about books.

It is about changing children’s emotional relationship with reading.

Why the reading crisis in India runs deeper than marks

Across India, concerns around foundational literacy have become increasingly urgent. Under the Government of India’s NIPUN Bharat mission, educators and policymakers have repeatedly pointed to a troubling reality: millions of children are progressing through school without developing basic reading skills.

Several national assessments have shown that many Grade 5 students still struggle to comfortably read Grade 2-level text.

For Turning Pages Foundation, however, the issue is not merely academic.

The founders believe many children disengage from reading long before they are officially identified as “weak readers”. By the time books enter their lives through exams, correction, and pressure, reading has already become associated with anxiety rather than pleasure.

“Children have an innate desire to read and listen to stories,” says Madhuri Pai, co-founder of the organisation and an IIM Bangalore graduate who spent 25 years in business management before moving into education. “The problem is that we often turn reading into a forced activity instead of an enjoyable one.”

That belief now sits at the centre of the foundation’s work.

Rather than focusing narrowly on test performance, the organisation works to build what it calls a “whole-school reading culture”, where books become part of everyday life inside classrooms, corridors, and homes.

How three sisters built Turning Pages Foundation

The idea for Turning Pages Foundation emerged from the sisters’ own childhood in Mangaluru, where books were deeply woven into family life.

“Our best memories growing up involved books,” says Bunty Pai. “Reading was never treated like homework in our house. It was associated with comfort, joy, and conversation.”

Though the sisters eventually entered different professions, books remained a constant thread.

Bunty........

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