IAS officer’s app helps rural kids speak English | Lucknow News
Lucknow: In many districts of Uttar Pradesh, where children grow up in households with little or no exposure to spoken English, learning the language often becomes a challenge rather than an opportunity.Seeking to bridge this gap, the district magistrate of Deoria, Divya Mittal (2013 batch IAS officer), has co-developed Kiki English, a free mobile app designed to help countless first-generation learners in the state where English-speaking environments at home are rare.The idea for the app emerged from Mittal’s years of field experience, where she observed that children, despite being eager to learn, lacked the confidence that comes from repeated spoken practice.“I noted that students were treating English as a subject instead of a language. Languages are absorbed not through rote learning but through speaking and listening. Drawing on my experience of learning French at Alliance Française, where the emphasis was heavily on conversation, I saw the need for a similar tool tailored for early learners in UP’s rural belts,” said Mittal (42), who is credited with bringing piped tap water to the water-scarce Lahuriya Deh village in Mirzapur district in 2023, ending a 75-year crisis for 125 households.Developed over six months, Kiki English was a collaborative effort with her spouse, Gagandeep Singh, an ex-bureaucrat-turned-entrepreneur. While Mittal focused on the content — researching the first 500 essential words and crafting child-friendly, relatable vocabulary — the technical backbone and coding were led by her partner.Both are alumni of IIT Delhi and IIM Bangalore.“The app is designed primarily for children aged 3 to 6, though older learners with limited exposure can also benefit. It adopts a gamified format: children earn stars for completing activities, unlock badges as they progress, and appear on leaderboards that motivate for consistent practice. Listening and speaking form the core of the curriculum, helping children to think in English even without a supportive home environment,” she told TOI.While visuals are central to teaching concepts, the app currently supports Hindi for limited assistance. “It has not yet been piloted in schools, but I intend to use it for students of govt school,” said Mittal, who hails from New Delhi.The app gained over 5,000 users within the first 18 hours of its launch. It also partially works offline — speech practice and spelling tasks do not require connectivity, while listening modules need only a one-time internet load.Meanwhile, public response on social media platforms has been enthusiastic. Many users from eastern UP shared that they downloaded the app for children in their families, calling it useful, amazing, and a “blessing for poor families”. Others praised the initiative as thoughtful, inspiring, and capable of becoming a major support system for govt school students.Mittal said future expansion would depend on feedback from children, with plans to eventually add advanced language levels and additional foundational learning modules.
