Madras Dyslexia Association: a parent's guide

The Madras Dyslexia Association (MDA) is a Chennai non-profit that has supported children with dyslexia since 1992 through centre-based remediation, screening and assessment, teacher training, and school programmes. This guide explains what MDA does, the approach behind its work, and how families engage it. Then, for parents weighing their options, it explains what Flourishing Kids offers alongside MDA as one-to-one online dyslexia intervention.

What is the Madras Dyslexia Association?

MDA was founded in 1992 by parents of children with dyslexia, educators and philanthropists, at a time when there was very little awareness or support in India. Its stance is summed up in its own words: children with dyslexia learn differently, so we teach differently. The goal running through everything MDA does is early identification and timely intervention, so that children stay in mainstream education and reach their potential. Cricketer R. Ashwin is the organisation's Goodwill Ambassador.

What programmes does MDA run?

Ananya Learning and Research Centre. MDA's full-time remediation programme, where children who need intensive support are taught outside mainstream school until they are ready to return. Across three decades MDA has supported around 1,500 children in full-time remediation and roughly 3,000 more part-time.

Screening and assessment. A screening for younger children and a fuller assessment for older ones, covering attention, language, reading, writing, spelling, comprehension, maths and motor planning, with a detailed case history from parents. Families receive a report of strengths and need areas with remedial ideas, and referrals to other professionals where needed. MDA is explicit that assessment is for helping the child, not for labels.

Teacher training and school support. MDA has trained over 2,000 mainstream teachers and helped set up resource rooms in roughly 200 schools, reaching thousands of children each year through the schools themselves.

Tamil Vazhi Payirchi. A programme MDA designed for children studying in Tamil-medium schools, including a free online remediation course in Tamil built with NPTEL-IIT Madras. That is a rare resource: most structured literacy work worldwide exists only in English.

Around these sit awareness campaigns, psychological guidance, counselling services and publications.

What approach does MDA use?

MDA's remedial teaching is based on the Orton-Gillingham approach, integrated with a multiple-intelligences approach: structured, multisensory teaching of how written English works, adapted to each child's strengths. If you want to understand this family of teaching in depth, see our guide to the Orton-Gillingham approach.

How do families engage MDA?

In person, in Chennai. The usual path is a screening or assessment first, followed by a recommendation: part-time remedial help alongside school, or intensive full-time remediation at Ananya. Their published materials do not list fees; you contact them directly.

What does Flourishing Kids offer alongside this?

Flourishing Kids builds on the same foundations of structured, explicit, multisensory teaching in the Orton-Gillingham tradition, and delivers them in a different form.

One specialist, every session. Every session, from the first assessment to the last lesson, is taught personally by Dr. V.S. Gayathri, a Certified Dyslexia Therapist, Orton-Gillingham trained, with 4,000+ hours of one-to-one intervention. She trained in Sounds in Syllables, a multisensory structured language therapy programme accredited at the Therapy level by IMSLEC. That is training at the therapy tier, beyond the teaching-level methods most remedial programmes use. She took MDA's own seven-week online course between April and June 2019, before going on to therapist-level training in Mumbai.

The whole child. Her background in counselling (M.Sc. in Counselling and Psychotherapy) shapes how sessions handle the part of dyslexia that worksheets miss: the anxiety, avoidance and bruised confidence a child carries after years of struggling with print.

One-to-one, online, anywhere. No centre, no commute, no waiting list tied to a city. Children stay in their regular school while sessions of 45 to 60 minutes run two to three times a week, paced by mastery. Families across India, the UAE, Oman, Singapore, Australia, the UK and the US learn this way; their stories are on the testimonials page.

The first step is the Reading & Spelling Snapshot, an informal reading and spelling assessment: Rs 2,500 for families in India, USD 100 for families outside India. Or start with a free 15-minute conversation with Dr. Gayathri.

Common questions