Victor Lyons cuts an unusual figure riding his bicycle in the sweaty Delhi traffic, which he does every day in the city he has made his home. His mission to make one million rural Indian women literate over five years is even more out of the ordinary.
A trained mental health counsellor, Mr Lyons has developed what he claims is the fastest literacy programme in the world. His Tara Akshar system teaches women to read and write Hindi in less than 30 days with an alleged 90 per cent success rate. Indian government programmes take a year or two.
The 57-year-old Yorkshireman used his background in mental health and IT to create an alphabet using memory techniques.
For example, the Hindi sound for "g" as in gaajar (carrot) resembles in script form two dangling carrots. So on his alphabet he has superimposed two carrots over that letter. Similarly, the letter "B" for bhaaloo (bear) looks like a bear.
The programme stemmed from Mr Lyons' experiences in the Punjab, where he arrived five years ago to work in health education, and his own efforts to learn Hindi (still infused with a broad Yorkshire brogue).
"I was wandering around the Punjab, wondering what it would take to get people to use toilets and clean water so you could lower the child-mortality rates. But I realised that it wasn't going to work as people couldn't read. You have to start with literacy. A third of the population is illiterate. That's around 400 million illiterates and semi-literates.
"We have to teach the millions of adults - mostly rural, mostly female - who never learnt to read, and the millions of kids who drop out of school."
Working with Tarahaat, an organisation that sets up village computer training centres, Mr Lyons has taught 25 "master trainers" who in turn have have instructed 200 trainers and 50 "quality controllers" to dispense his Tara Akshar programme. Armed with laptops and books, they have travelled dusty roads as the project unfurls across north India.
Over the past two weeks thousands of women queued in the 114 villages across Bihar and Jharkhand, India's poorest states which have the lowest literacy levels (47 per cent compared to the national 61 per cent), where the project was launched.
The free courses, funded by the British Government, proved so popular trainers had to turn away up to 15,000 women. Even so, at current capacity (teaching 18 women at each location in three batches of six, limited by the number of laptops) more than 2,000 illiterate women will become literate each month.
On Monday Mr Lyons' team, which includes a retired Indian army colonel and an ex-Citibank director from the UK, will launch 73 classes in Uttar Pradesh. The target is to make 50,000 women literate over the next 12 months and Mr Lyons intends to ramp up the programme to reach his goal of one million people by 2012.
The experiences of the women provide a vivid argument for the importance of literacy. Asha is married and in her twenties with a two-year-old son. She was completely illiterate. At the end of the 30-day course, she said: "My husband used to consider me good-for-nothing because I was illiterate. He would never include me in taking decisions. But now that I can read, our whole relationship has changed. My husband treats me with respect. I am now for the first time a part of the decision making in our house."
Most government literacy programmes focus on teaching children. The Tara Akshar classes have been an extraordinary tool for women's empowerment.
Mr Lyons says: "A newly literate woman gains self-esteem. She can now read the documents that banks and husbands make her sign. And she will now encourage her children to stay on at school and be literate."
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