In Haryana, Hundreds Protest State\'s Response to Rape

Mustafa Quraishi/Associated Press
Member of women's organizations and their supporters at a protest to condemn the rising incidents of rape and violence against women in Haryana in Rohtak, Haryana on Oct. 15.

In Haryana, which has seen a troubling number of rapes recently, 800 protesters took to the streets on Monday to demand better policing and a safer environment for women.

There have been at least 17 cases of rape reported in Haryana in the past month, according to the All-India Democratic Women's Association, which led a rally in Rohtak that also drew representatives from other organizations like All India Dalit Mahila Adhikar Manch, the National Federation of Indian Women and the Center for Social Research.

“The protest sent out the clear sign that women are no longer ready to take this kind of treatment meted out by a patriarchal system and a government that connives with the accused because they are the powerful,” said Shabnam Hashmi, a trustee at Anhad, an organization that works in the Mewat region of Haryana.

Over the last year, the Haryana government has been criticized for their lack of response to the increase in the number of rapes and its inability to curb sexual assaults. The Haryana spokesman for the Congress Party, Dharambir Goyat, was quoted as saying that he thought 90 percent of rapes were consensual, but he was later rebuked by the party for his statement.

On Monday, the Haryana Congress legislator Sampat Singh said , “Haryana has progressed economically, but it has not developed mentally and intellectually, leading to rising incidences of rape in the state.” Meanwhile, the West Bengal chief minister, Mamata Banerjee, said that the increase in rapes in India could be attributed to the fact that men and women interact with each other more freely than before.

Protesters in Rohtak held a public meeting on Monday where activists discussed possible solutions, while the families of rape victims shared their stories. After the meeting, they marched to the district commissioner's office and submitted a memorandum that demanded the government ensure quick and fair investigations into rape cases, set up fast-track courts to deal with sexual assault and rape cases and create more effective police forces.

“The protest was meant to express our anger and dissatisfaction at the Haryana government who has yet not arrested many rapists, and to pressurize the government to act,” sai d Ranjana Kumari, director of the Center for Social Research, who attended the protest.

The police attacked the crowd with sticks, she said, which caused a stampede that injured three people. “What was a peaceful meeting suddenly turned violent,” Ms. Kumari said.

In Delhi, the National Federation of Indian Women held a rally in a show of support for women of the Dalit caste, many of whom are victims of rape in Haryana.

“In this country, the biggest challenge for women is to safeguard their right to be born, and from that stage onwards women face all sorts of discrimination,” said Annie Raja, general secretary of the National Federation of Indian Women. “Even though internationally we have a reputation to be a developing country with prospects for economic growth, but for the women of this country, day by day we are living a more frightened life.”

Ms. Raja said that while each successive government promises to put in place new legislation t o safeguard women, the government fails to enforce existing laws.

What especially angers women's rights groups is the local authorities' penchant for blaming the rapes on the victims. In September, a member of the state's khap panchayat, a self-appointed council of village heads, said that in order to curb such crimes the marriage age should be lowered to 16, from 18, so that women won't be tempted to satisfy their sexual urges elsewhere. Balwan Singh Nain, a 48-year-old farmer and khap member, told India Ink, “They say empty mind is a devil's workshop, so if girls quit studying at the age of 15, how will they keep themselves engaged?”

Activists contend that the presence of khap panchayats undermines the system of law and order in the state of Haryana. “The problem is not just the numbers of women who are getting raped but the discourse after the rape and the response of the state,” said Kavita Srivastava, national secretary of the People's Union for Civi l Liberties, who attended the protest in Rohtak. “The khap panchayats are not just an embarrassment but part of the problem â€" they are reinforcing the unlawful behavior of these men.”

Those who report rapes often find themselves shunned by the local authorities. In a recent case that came to light on Saturday, a 13-year-old schoolgirl was allegedly raped over a period of four months by a fruit vendor outside her school in Fatehbad, a town in Haryana. When the girl's mother lodged a complaint against the man, the school authorities reacted by expelling the girl and her two younger sisters. On Sunday, the school authorities said the three sisters had left the school on their own. However, after the girl underwent a medical examination that confirmed that she had been raped, the suspect was arrested.

“The whole attitude of the police is so anti-women,” said Ms. Srivastava. “There is the breakdown of the criminal justice system on one hand and the lack of an enabling environment for women on the other. In this kind of environment there can be no justice.”

On Friday, the Haryana government announced several measures designed to reduce the incidence of crimes against women, including an increase in police patrols in rural areas. The government also opened a 24-hour hotline for women in the police control room in Panchkula district and is planning to set up one in every district.

“The idea is that if any woman calls saying that they have been harassed on the street, at college or elsewhere, we will send police help immediately,” said Meenakshi Sharma, a female constable who answered the women's hotline in Panchkula, which has yet to receive any calls for help.

Ms. Sharma said that they did not receive any special training for manning the hotline, which is one reason that activists are dubious about the efficacy of such measures. “It is too little and too late,” said Ms. Kumari of the Center for Socia l Research. “Having a helpline is not enough. There has to be somebody on the other side to provide help. The Haryana police have to become much more effective if it hopes to actually protect these women.”

Image of the Day: Oct. 15

Indranil Mukherjee/Agence France-Presse - Getty ImagesHindu devotees performing “Tarpan,” a ritual which involves paying obeisance to one's forefathers, in Mumbai, Maharashtra.

When Air India Was Efficient, Profitable and Growing Fast

Courtesy of Björn LarssonA Tata Airlines route map from 1939.

Having convinced the government, in 1932, that he should run an air mail service for it, 28-year-old J. R. D. Tata did not need much longer to demonstrate that he was doing a stand-up job. Tata Air Mail's scrupulous adherence to schedules was legendary. Only a year into its operations, the Directorate of Civil Aviation wrote in a report:

“As an example of how air mail service should be run, we commend the efficiency of Tata Services who on October 10, 1933, arriving at Karachi as usual to time, completed a year's working with 100 per cent punctuality… Our esteemed Trans-Continental Airways, alias Imperial Airways [the British carrier], might send their staff on deputation to Tatas to see how it is done.”

Tata Air Mail made a profit of 60,000 rupees its first year. By 1937, that profit had risen to 600,000 rupees. Auxiliary routes were developed, but its main one continued to retrace the 1932 trial run by Mr. Tata and Nevill Vintcent, skipping from Karachi through Ahmedabad and Bombay to Madras. A handsomely illustrated 1935 timetable (mentioning, as an aside, that “Tata Air Mail ‘Planes are lubricated with Mobiloil”) reveals that a letter from Karachi to Madras would leave on Monday between 6 and 6:30 a.m., pass through Ahmedabad four hours later and Bombay around lunchtime, spend the night in Hyderabad, and arrive at the Madras airport at 9:55 a.m. on Tuesday.

Courtesy of Björn LarssonA Tata Airlines poster from 1939.

In 1938, just after Mr. Tata changed the name of his company to Tata Airlines, he began to run regularly into the a fickle and obstinate government, a process of attrition that wearied and exasperated him for the next 15 years. During World War II, the government commandeered all his aircraft. When he offered to manufacture the De Havilland Mosquito in India, he was first encouraged and then instructed to make gliders instead. Not long thereafter, the government cancelled the contract because, ironically, it didn't have airplanes to tow the gliders â€" the very airplanes that Mr. Tata had offered to make in the first place.

Mr. Vintcent, Mr. Tata's chief collaborator, died in 1942, when a military airplane he was traveling in was shot down off the co ast of France. Nevertheless, Mr. Tata continued to prepare, as he later told his biographer R. M. Lala, “tentative post-war plans of development of our own, which included…the operation of external services westwards and, if possible, all the way to England.”

Soon after the war ended, Mr. Tata set about putting these plans into motion, renaming his company Air India, taking it public and hiring a former TWA stewardess to train his new flight attendants. In 1948, shortly before Air India launched its Bombay-London route, Mr. Tata agreed to allow the new Indian government to own 49 percent of the airline, with the option to buy another 2 percent whenever it desired. The arrangement was, in retrospect, an odd one, for in giving the government the chance to become the majority shareholder, it opened the door to the nationalization of the airline. And yet Mr. Tata had, in 1946, told the Associated Press of India: “In the present instance…there is an overwhelming c ase against the nationalisation of Indian airlines.”

Courtesy of Björn LarssonAn Air India poster from Aug. 2, 1949.

Almost inevitably, in 1953, the government paid 28 million rupees to secure a majority stake in Air India's stock; For another 30 million rupees, it also purchased eight other domestic airlines. Mr. Tata was disconsolate. In his biography of Mr. Tata, “Beyond the Last Blue Mountain,” Mr. Lala quotes him as telling colleagues: “I was so indignant at the manner in which the Government had treated the air transport industry…and had deliberately brought it to its knees, in order to acquire it for a song.” The previous year, he had already co mplained to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru that members of his cabinet were “resorting to incorrect and unfair statements…that the airlines in general, and Air India in particular, are dishonest and greedy, cannot be trusted, and fully deserve their present plight.” Mr. Nehru replied that his government had been “driven to the conclusion that there was no other way out except to organise [the airlines] together under the State.”

In a long, stinging telegram back to Mr. Nehru, Mr. Tata minced no words:

I CAN ONLY DEPLORE THAT SO VITAL A STEP SHOULD HAVE BEEN TAKEN WITHOUT GIVING US A PROPER HEARING

The pain of having his airline snatched away in this manner never entirely dissipated. In a letter to a colleague, Mr. Tata wrote:

“Even more than the decision itself, I was upset by the manner in which nationalisation was introduced through the back door without any prior consultation of any kind with the in dustry… However, we have to reconcile ourselves to the fact that we are living in a political and bureaucratic age in which people like ourselves no longer count for much in the scheme of things.”

A more admirable coda followed. Having taken possession of his airline, the government concluded that the best person to guide Air India was Mr. Tata himself, and it invited him back to be its chairman. This presented a quandary, and Mr. Tata canvassed the opinions of his top managers before he made his decision and took the job. “I came to the conclusion,” Morgan Witzel quotes Mr. Tata as saying in his book “Tata: The Evolution of a Corporate Brand,” “that I should not shirk the opportunity of discharging a duty to the country and to Indian aviation. I am particularly anxious that the present high standards of Air India International should not be adversely affected by nationalization.”

In a final message to the Air India staff that summer of 1953, before he lost ownership of his airline, Mr. Tata wrote:

“So as this last day of July marks the passing of an enterprise born twenty-one years ago, my thoughts turn to happier days gone by and in particular to an exciting October dawn, when a Puss Moth and I soared joyfully from Karachi.”

This is the second of a two-part series, in honor of Air India's 80th birthday, which is October 15. Read part one about the airline's birth here.

Video of Baumgartner\'s Supersonic Free Fall

Video highlights of an Austrian daredevil's plunge to earth from the edge of space on Sunday.

As my colleague John Tierney reports, Felix Baumgartner, a former Austrian paratrooper, made the highest and fastest jump in history on Sunday, after ascending by a helium balloon to an altitude of 128,100 feet.

Stepping from a capsule tethered to the balloon, the daredevil plunged to Earth, reaching a maximum speed measured at 833.9 miles per hour, or Mach 1.24, becoming the first human to break the sound barrier under his own power, before opening his parachute.

The jump was broadcast on live television and streamed on a one-minute delay on YouTube, where it was watched by millions of viewers. A 90-second highlight reel, which includes images shot from the sky-diver's suit, was posted online by the sponsor, the Austrian energy drink company Red Bull.

The Guardian uploaded video of the entire four-and-a-half-minute jump, taken from the live broadcast.

Although the total cost of the Red Bull Stratos project was not revealed, it was believed to be somewhat more than the $400 two Canadian teenagers spent to send a Lego man bearing a Canadian flag about 80,000 feet above the Earth's surface in January.

A Canadian “legonaut” journeyed 80,000 feet above the Earth and back again, and has the video to prove it.

Newswallah: Bharat Edition

Jammu and Kashmir: The state assembly on Wednesday witnessed a protest by legislators from some opposition parties, who demanded that seats be set aside for members of scheduled castes, scheduled tribes, other backwards classes and women in next month's block development council elections, Kashmir Live reported.

Assam: The series of floods that struck Assam this year have displaced nearly 1.8 million children, the Business Standard reported, citing a study by Save the Children, a nongovernmental organization.

West Bengal: The state's commerce minister has said that an auction is the “most transparent way” of allocating state-owned resources, Live Mint reported. This comment comes on the heels of last month's Supreme Court decision that said auctions weren't the only way to sell national assets. The newspaper noted that the recent auctions of land in industrial parks did not find many takers.

Bihar: A recent United Nations report has found that Bihar has the highest percentage of girls getting married before the age of 18 in the country, the legal age for girls in India, the Hindustan Times reported. However, the report also noted a decline in the overall rate of child marriages in India.

Gujarat: After a decade, Britain has ended its official no-contact policy with Gujarat, which had been put in place after the 2002 Godhra riots in which three British citizens were killed. Hugo Swire, the British Foreign Office minister in charge of India, has asked the British High Commissioner in New Delhi to meet with the state's chief minister, Narendra Modi, and senior state leaders.

Andhra Pradesh: Sharmila, the younger sister of the political party leader Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy, who is in jail, will embark on a 3,000-kilometer (1,860-mile) political walk through the state on Oct. 18, The New Indian Express reports. Ms. Sharmila's journey, which would be similar to one undertaken by her fath er, a former chief minister of the state, is an attempt to counter another political march by a local leader, Chandrababu Naidu, the paper reported.

Newswallah: Long Reads Edition

ReutersA magazine stand on a railway platform in Mumbai.

An estimated 46,000 people die in India every year because of snake bites. Or, put in another way, there is one death caused by a snake bite for every two people who die of AIDS in India. Tehelka magazine has these shocking figures in a story titled “Snake Bites and Poisoned Stats.” The writer, Jay Mazoomdaar, says that scores of these snake bite deaths aren't present in government reports partly because few of the victims reach hospitals.

Superstition and a lack of awareness contribute to the death count. Life-saving snake antivenom serum is expensive and in short supply.

“Basic preca utions such as using shoes, torches and mosquito nets, avoiding sleeping on the ground or ridding the household of garbage and courtyards of piled-up debris can drastically reduce instances of snake bites,” Mr. Mazoomdaar notes.

“To effectively combat the menace of snake bite, the Union government must first acknowledge the crisis,” the story says.

It must be declared a notifiable disease that makes reporting of deaths mandatory. We need resources to promote research, spread awareness, develop quality serum, ensure its availability in remote villages and build medical infrastructure to handle snake bite.

Open magazine ran a cover story this week on the man of the moment: Robert Vadra, the son-in-law of arguably the most powerful politician in India today, Sonia Gandhi. Mr. Vadra is in the headlines because of recent allegations that he's had shady business dealings with a real estate company. The a rticle says that Mr. Vadra's silence about the allegations speaks volumes, especially because he's spoken out in the past to counter public perception that he was using the Gandhi family's influence. It notes that Mr. Vadra, who is married to Mrs. Gandhi's daughter, Priyanka, had even issued a public notice once severing ties with his father, Rajindra Vadra, and brother, Richard:

In a subsequent interview, Robert claimed that his move was pre-emptive, aimed at stopping the two, especially his brother, Richard, in their tracks. “When people come to me for favors, I immediately say ‘no.' I mind my own business. It's not a large one. But it helps me make ends meet and I have a happy life. That's what it's all about. Now, after this advertisement, people who approach [my relatives] will stop doing so. All this will stop. It's not just my relatives, it's also people who think they can get to me and Priyanka. And that's not going to happen. In the long run, t his advertisement was a smart idea. It's better to act now before anyone is hurt.”

Today, Mr. Vadra cannot make the same claims about his business. The question is not whether his business makes ends meets, or even if he leads a happy life. What matters today is his prolonged silence on charges of far greater impropriety. In a country committed in principle to its citizens' right to information, and one long menaced by the phenomenon of power peddling, people at large have a right to know how Robert Vadra's businesses grew so quickly once the U.P.A. was in power.

Down to Earth magazine digs deep into a government-ordered independent report on illegal mining in Goa. More than half the iron ore exported from India comes from Goa, the article says. The story, “Irongate Opened,” says that the report accuses both the state and the environment ministry of “allowing illegal mining in the state, putting the region's environment and ecology at risk.†

“The common illegalities the report points to are mining without license, mining outside lease area and transporting minerals illegally,” the story notes.

In response to the report, the state and environment ministry have suspended environmental clearances and operations of 93 of the 337 mining leases in Goa, the article says.

Tata Motors to Revamp the Nano

Jaguar/Land Rover Ratan Tata, on Wednesday in Paramus, N.J.

PARAMUS, N.J. - Ratan Tata, chairman of Tata Motors, the parent of Jaguar Land Rover, paid a visit to this realm of shopping malls and car dealerships on Wednesday evening to inaugurate Prestige Jaguar Land Rover of Paramus. The store is operated by Prestige, one of the company's top-performing dealers.

Also on hand, making its first public appearance in the United States since its unveiling two weeks ago at the Paris motor show, was the 2013 Jaguar F-Type. Among the crowd gathered to appreciate it was Plaxico Burress, the former wide receiver for the Giants and Jets, who looked to be a tight fit in the roadster, although he did not try its driver's seat.

Jaguar/Land Rover Plaxico Burress, with the F-Type on Wednesday.

Playing off Jaguar's marketing message of recapturing its sporting heritage with the F-Type, a vintage E-Type was displayed nearby.

In an interview here on Wednesday, Mr. Tata described the F-Type as the keystone of the Jaguar brand. With a degree in architecture from Cornell, Mr. Tata said he took a proactive role in overseeing the design efforts of the two premium brands, communicating frequently with Ian Callum, the head of design for Jaguar, and Gerry McGovern, who heads design at Land Rover.

Accompanied by Andy Goss, president of Jaguar Land Rover North America, Mr. Ta ta called the F-Type “a Jekyll and Hyde car.”

“We wanted a car that the housewife could drive down to the supermarket and if you were a serious driver you could do what you wanted on hilly roads or a track - a car that really had performance, not a sissy car but a truly macho car,” he said.

“You should be able to look at it and imagine a big number on the door or nice and shiny in the supermarket parking lot.”

Jaguar/Land Rover 2013 Jaguar F-Type, on display on Wednesday.

The two marques are prospering, but the F-Type, even if it sells well, is not expected to increase profits greatly. Jaguar lacks a volume-oriented luxury pr oduct to compete with the likes of the BMW 3 Series and Mercedes-Benz C-Class. The brand intends to build this product, but only when it deigns a design worthy of the cat on the grille, Mr. Tata said.

“I think we recognize the importance of having an entry-level Jaguar that retains the Jaguar brand without looking like another product,” he said. “One that at the same time is smaller and more agile and more appealing to the young owner who would like to have what Jaguar makes - namely, a fast car that is attractive and is a sedan.”

He further distinguished the F-Type in the company's history from somewhat retro-theme efforts like the S-Type sedan of the late 1990s. A design study offered by Bertone last year of a future Jaguar sedan clashed with the brand's embrace of the new. “Jaguar designs as they stand today are not looking back,” Mr. Tata said. “I think Jaguar spent many years creating products that related to successful past products and were a fraid to branch out into new territory.”

Mr. Tata said that as a child he drew cars and airplanes, a tendency he confessed to practice still during business meetings.

After he acquired Jaguar Land Rover from Ford in 2008, Mr. Tata said, working with the designers at each brand initially “took a bit of acceptance.”

“Then, as the barriers came down, there was more and more of a free involvement with each of them,” he said. Since the change of ownership, the designers have become more venturesome, he said, owing to the new corporate parent's having brought a sense of “freedom of design expression.”

At the command of an industrial empire, of which Jaguar Land Rover was but one part, Mr. Tata also revealed that Tata Motors in India was looking to redo the Nano, the minicar that despite a wave of publicity and having staked a claim to being the least expensive new car in the world has been a commercial disappointment.

Being the cheapest turned out to be a negative selling point in Indian culture, he concluded, saying that the Nano as it exists could play better in other parts of the world. “We are looking to such areas as Malaysia or Indonesia or Africa,” he said. “We are also putting back in some of the things we took out to make the Nano the cheapest.”

Such calculations literally seemed half a world removed from the showroom on Wednesday night. The F-Type is priced from $69,875 and can range beyond $92,000.

Jaguar/Land Rover Mr. Tata, with an XJ at the dealership on Wednesday.

Lacking Teachers and Textbooks, India\'s Schools Turn to Khan Academy to Survive

R KrithivasanStudents at Sree Karpagavalli Vidhyalaya school in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, watching Khan Academy math videos.

CHENNAI - In a country where teachers are in short supply and decent textbooks are hard to find, Indian schools are pinning their hopes on a free online tutorial service based in the United States.

A few Indian schools are already using Khan Academy, which offers lessons on numerous subjects through online videos, to cement math and science fundamentals, cut student absenteeism, boost test scores and in some cases, to simply survive. But these one-time school initiatives could gai n traction from an effort to dub 450 of the 3,400 English-language Khan Academy videos in at least three Indian languages, as well as other efforts to make them more accessible to Indian students.

In addition, Khan Academy is in early talks with India's Ministry of Human Resource Development to match schools' syllabi with the relevant Web tutorials.

“What our teachers have is merely textbooks, and there is a dire need of solid teaching and learning resources,” said Giridhar Subramanian of Azim Premji Foundation, a nonprofit organization in Bangalore that focuses on education. The foundation has already dubbed 38 Khan Academy videos in Hindi, Tamil and Kannada, with plans to complete 120 by March and 450 by 2014.

The foundation is making the dubbed videos available through an affiliated Web site, TeachersofIndia.org and through its field institutes that work with rural schools.

“When good instructional material is ea sily available, why should we reinvent?” he said.

Khan Academy was started in 2008 by Salman Khan, an alumnus of Harvard Business School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, following the growing popularity of video tutorials he did for his cousins. In 2010, Khan Academy received a $2 million grant from Google and $1.5 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

As of August, three to four percent of the site's six million monthly users were from India, making it the third-largest traffic generator, behind Canada and the United States, Sundar Subbarayan, leader of Khan Academy's school partnerships, said in an interview via Skype and in an e-mail. He also said he was aware of 10 schools in India that are using Khan Academy videos.

Some of those Indian users came from the computer lab at Sree Karpagavalli Vidhyalaya Middle School, a troubled private school in central Chennai that receives government funds for the first- to fifth-grade cla sses. The nonprofit Altius Foundation in Chennai pays for the teachers in the sixth to eighth grades. Most of the school's students come from one of the dozen neighborhood slums, and vast majority of their parents have never had a school education.

During a recent visit to a second-floor classroom, 11 girls and 5 boys, dressed in checked beige shirts and brown pants, were seated with their headsets, watching their choice of math-based Khan Academy videos that were subtitled in Tamil by the foundation. If the students, who are 10 to 12 years old, don't understand something, they can seek clarification from one of the two supervisors in the lab, which has 16 Web-enabled computers.

“The system is goal-based and so kids are able to work at their pace,” said Srikanth Chandrasekaran, a stock trader and a philanthropist who runs the Altius Foundation. He donated 500,000 rupees ($9,400) to set up the computer lab in June 2011 at the middle school.

Over the past decade, 20 of the 28 rooms in the school have gradually gathered dust as the student population at Sree Karpagavalli dwindled to 225, one third of the 720 students who attended in 2000. An increasing number of shanty dwellers choose to send their kids to private English-language schools, which are seen as a ticket out of poverty and into India's job market.

“The school was actually dying because the medium of instruction was Tamil and they were also not getting good teachers,” said Mr. Chandrasekaran.

Now sixth-graders craft their weekly math lesson plans using the Khan Academy videos. Because the math teacher quit at the end of the last academic year in April, these videos are now the primary form of math instruction in the school, which has just 12 teachers, half the number it had 10 years ago.

“Many of the sixth-grade children didn't even know to add or subtract, but now math scores have improved,” said Gopalan Ganesan, a retired businessman who volunteered to be the school's treasurer four years ago. Nearly one-third of the class has scored above 80 percent in recent sixth-grade tests, and fewer than 10 percent of the students have failed, which is a marked improvement from before, said Mr. Ganesan.

Just four miles away, the American India Foundation, backed by Indian diaspora in the United States, has also started using Khan Academy videos to support math and science study at the Jaigopal Garodia Government Girls Higher Secondary School in northwest Chennai.

It is a much larger school than Sree Karpagavalli, offering courses in both English and Tamil to 1,000 girls, who are largely from poor families. In July, after a visit by Khan Academy's Mr. Subbarayan, the American India Foundation started a pilot program to tutor children using Khan Academy videos in the school's lab, which has 25 laptops donated from the American computer maker Dell.

“We are working with first-generation learners, and i f they are unable to read or write, it shrinks their interest in the subject, leading to absenteeism,” said Baskaran Dheenadayalan, a program manager for the foundation who is based in Chennai.

Just two months after the video tutoring program started, the attendance rate of sixth- to 10th-grade students, who have access to Khan Academy videos in the lab, has risen to 92 percent in August from just 63 percent in June, Mr. Dheenadayalan said.

Even schools with more affluent student populations are supplementing their lessons with videos from the Khan Academy. R.N. Podar School in Mumbai found it difficult to accommodate computer lab slots for all its students. Instead, the school has started assigning course-specific video tutorials as homework to its 2,700 students, who come from middle-class families with Internet access at home.

“Now the teacher's time is spent not in preparing lectures but in understanding the class and designing classroom interaction with differentiated instructions where peer learning happens,” said Avnita Bir, R.N. Podar School's principal, in a telephone interview.

One of Mrs. Bir's concerns has been high levels of teacher attrition, sometimes even during a school year, and she finds the free online tutorials a much-needed backup to cope with teacher shortages.

Mr. Subbarayan confirmed that Khan Academy had a “brief conversation” with the Indian government to map the Central Board of Secondary Education syllabi to Khan Academy videos and that the nonprofit plans to set up an India office by June next year.

The biggest obstacles to implementing the Web tutorials more widely in India are spotty Internet connectivity, lack of funds to purchase computers and patchy student comprehension of the American-accented English in the videos, although one nonprofit, the Central Square Foundation, is dubbing Khan Academy videos into Indian-accented English.

But Mr. Subbarayan was opti mistic that Khan Academy could help India's education system.

“The price of technology is falling and India can skip generations in education, but you need the right mindset,” he said. “Education is a right, and everybody has a right for good-quality education.”