Sesame Street comes to India

GelflingWaldo

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The residents of Sesame Street will soon speak in Hindi to engage Indian children with local stories. Sesame Street is working on an Indian adaptation.

The show has different educational storylines and characters around the world, to reflect issues affecting children in specific countries.

The New York-based Sesame Workshop, a non-profit educational group, has sent its people to India to talk to teachers, broadcasters, government agencies and non-governmental organisations about how to develop the Indian adaptation of the show. The United States Agency for International Development (USaid) has given a grant of $500,000 to Sesame Workshop to design and develop the Indian version.

The United States Agency for International Development (USaid) has given a grant of $500,000 to Sesame Workshop to design and develop the Indian version.

They plan to create local Indian Muppets. They will be characters that will engage Indian children and whom they will be able to relate to. Sesame WorkShop plans to work with local experts to explore the look and personalities of these characters.

The producers of the show for India are looking at developing characters which will highlight pressing local issues. Some of these issues are education of the girl child, ethnic differences, health and hygiene. So the Muppets for the Indian version could be multi-dimensional, encompassing many issues.

Indian children can look forward to their own Sesame Street on cable television and, possibly, the state-run Doordarshan channel by next summer. An official name is still being thought up.

Plans are also afoot to develop the show for radio in India - South Africa is the only other country where the Sesame show is also being developed for radio.

International versions of Sesame Street are given their own Muppets to reflect local issues. In the Egyptian adaptation, girl Muppet Khokhawants to be an astronaut or a doctor and serves as a female role model. The South African version of the popular children's TV series has an HIV-positive character called Kami to encourage acceptance of people living with the virus. More information on the other internation versions can be found at http://www.sesameworkshop.com/international/
 

Drtooth

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I wonder if this will actually get anywhere, since the Belfast and Japanese co-productions seem to be in Limbo at the moment....
 
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