Villages set up own libraries with a little help from friends
NEW DELHI: It is a blistering afternoon, but as you enter the community library in Kalda village, located in the Panchayat Ghar in the midst of green agricultural fields, you are buffeted by a gust of cool breeze wafting through its high open doors. About a dozen youngsters sit hunched over books at brand new desks. The library’s iron shelves have books for various competitive examinations. Through its windows, one can see the Eastern Peripheral Expressway (EPE) in the distance. “It is the favourite place of youngsters in the village; they spend most of the time here preparing for various competitive exams,” says Arvind Nagar, a village volunteer, who helps manage the library, which opened in November last year with the money contributed by villagers.
Kalda in Gautam Buddh Nagar district, about 45 km from Connaught Place, is not the only village to have set up a library—in fact, a rural library movement is sweeping across the country. In the past year alone, about 100 libraries with sleek, air-conditioned reading rooms have come up in the villages of Noida, Ghaziabad, Meerut, Bulandshahr, among others as part of Gram Pathshala, a community initiative led by youngsters in these villages. It started last year when a few students in the village approached Lal Bahar, an inspector with National Human Rights Commission, who lives in Ganauli village in Ghaziabad, complaining of a lack of a place