A proud moment for the Maharashtra Dyslexia Association and a memorable Milestone !
The Hon’ble Minister for Science & Technology and Earth Sciences, Dr. Harsh Vardhan released DALI (Dyslexia Assessment for Languages of India on 15th October 2015 at 4:00 pm at Anusandhan Bhawan, New Delhi. Dyslexia is categorized as a learning disability wherein school children do not achieve adequate reading skills. It has a worldwide incidence of 5-20%. The incidence of dyslexia in India is believed to be 15%. According to the Times of India, Jan 22, 2013, there are 228,994,454 students enrolled in recognized schools, which brings our count of dyslexic Indian children to nearly 35 million. In the absence of appropriate standardized screening and assessment tools in Indian languages, it has been extremely challenging to screen and diagnose Dyslexia in India. In keeping with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s, ‘Make in India’ and ‘Skill Development’ policy, the National Brain Research Centre has developed DALI. DALI, which stands for Dyslexia Assessment for Languages of India. DALI is a package that contains screening tools for school teachers and assessment tools for psychologists in Indian Languages to identify dyslexia. For the first time, India will have indigenously developed screening and assessment tools that have been standardized and validated across a large population of nearly 4840 children. The tools are are available in Hindi, Marathi, Kannada and English and development in other languages is in process. DALI contains Two screening tools for dyslexia (for school teachers) Namely the JST (Junior Screening Tool) for classes (1-2) and the MST (Middle Screening Tool) for classes (3-5) in four languages, Hindi, Marathi, Kannada and English. It also contains eight standardized and validated assessment Batteries to be used by psychologists. DALI was developed at the National Brain Research Centre under the leadership of (Principal Investigator) Prof Nandini Chatterjee Singh and her team under the aegis of a project supported by the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India. It was standardized and validated across four languages (Hindi, Marathi, Kannada and English) across schools at five centres (4840 children from classes 1-5),Orkids Centre for Learning Disabilities (Co-Investigator,Geet Oberoi),Delhi, Centre of Behavioural and Cognitive Sciences (Co-Investigator,Bhoomika Rastogi Kar), University of Allahabad, Allahabad, Maharashtra Dyslexia Association (Co-Investigator, Kate Currawalla), Mumbai, Dr.Shanta Vaidya Memoria lFoundation (CoInvestigator, Kshipra Vaidya), Pune, and All India Institute of Speech and Hearing (Co-Investigator, Prema Rao), Mysore. This is the largest such project to have been undertaken in India and was funded by the Cognitive Science Initiative of the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India. For further details on DALI contact Dr. Nandini Singh at Nandini@nbrc.ac.in.
For free downloading of the screening tools and assessment batteries visit
http://14.139.62.22/DALI/index.php
http://www.nbrc.ac.in/download/post_release_writeup.pdf