Abstract. Locally decodable codes (LDC) [1,5] are error correcting codes that allow decoding (any) individual symbol of the message, by reading only few symbols of the codeword. Consider an application such as storage solutions for large data, where errors may occur in the disks (or some disks may just crush). In such an application, it is often de-sirable to recover only small portions of the data (have random access). Thus, in such applications, using LDC provides enormous efficiency gains over standard error correcting codes (ECCs), that need to read the en-tire encoded message to learn even a single bit of information. Typically, LDC’s, as well as standard ECC’s decode the encoded messaged if upto some bounded fraction of the symbols had been modified. This corre-sponds to decoding strings of bounded Hamming distance from a valid codeword. An often more realistic metric is the edit distance, measur-ing the shortest sequence of insertions and deletions (indel.) of symbols leading from one word to another. For example, (few) indel. modifica-