Kelvin Energy Solutions is a company that provides heating equipment to all kinds of industries. A friend recently took me to meet its founder, a self-made entrepreneur, Praful Wankhede, in Navi Mumbai. As I waited in the conference room to meet Wankhede, I saw numerous books on a shelf, starting with Leo Tolstoy’s War And Peace.
It is not often that you’ll find Tolstoy in a corporate office of a small industrial unit. In a country with burgeoning unemployment, Wankhede’s company employs over 300 people and he has another life-consuming obsession: making India read. He has started a foundation, Let’s Read India, that runs 11 libraries and 4 mobile libraries in different parts of Maharashtra.
Do people really read books these days? Isn’t everyone glued to their mobile phones? Indians hardly read. And so on. But these libraries serve the underprivileged who often have neither that a smartphone nor access to books, or at least the books one reads for leisure or knowledge, for curiosity and the plain old joy of good storytelling.
Wankhede’s infectious energy will silence the critic in you. He is spending his company’s money on this obsessive mission of his. The return on investment is huge: every time a reader picks and returns a book, Wankhede feels like his revolution is under way.
There are some 50,000 books he has put into circulation as of now, but his dream is much bigger. You can tell he is deeply rooted in his society and culture and wants his people, Maharashtrians, to broaden their minds through reading and be inspired to take on the world just like how his own journey from a village to an industrialist. He has only just begun.
A room for the readers
For many years I have felt this sadness about how few libraries we have in India, even for the privileged, in big cities. Hearing Wankhede’s endless stories about the reading revolution he is starting, I felt both nostalgia and envy. Nostalgia, because as a young student in Lucknow I used to go to the British Library. It opened many doors for me to the wider world at a time when my access to the internet was limited to an hour a day in a ‘cyber cafe’.
Then, one day, the British government decided to shut down the library. They were done spending money on Macaulay’s mission of making Indians read English. They now wanted to redirect those resources on making Indians spend their money to study in British universities.
The regular library goers put up a spirited but hopeless battle. This event changed my life as the library members got together to come up with a plan of action to save the library (my great contribution was to write an email to Her Majesty The Queen).
India is in dire need of a library revolution more than most countries. A crowded nation where many families live in a single room needs spaces for curious minds to read and think. Students need spaces just to sit and do their homework in peace, to study for competitive exams, or just to read the newspaper minus the noise of the TV soap opera reverberating in the house.
Too many books to not pick one
My envy over what Wankhede is doing in Maharashtra was misplaced. A few calls and I got to know of many such efforts across India. A very well known effort is called The Community Library Project that was started by author Mridula Koshy in Delhi in 2015.
Now running three libraries in Delhi for the underprivileged, completely free, they have over 5,000 members. The libraries have over 32,000 books. If someone just wants to come and sit and work on their laptops they are welcome, but the presence of a very large number of books helps people pick some out and give them a try.
Why did Mridula start these community libraries? Why would someone put in so much effort, from raising donations to managing these spaces? She tells me that as an author she would often talk to fellow writers and publishers about how few books sell in India. The definition of a best seller is 10,000 copies. Most book sales in India are educational books.
To change this, Koshy decided to look beyond the world of the privileged who can walk into a bookstore and buy any book they want. It is important for Mridula that these libraries have thousands of books each, not a mere hundred or two. She wants young readers to discover what interests them, to try different genres and authors. That is how you make them fall in love with books. These libraries also have many events such as interactions with authors.
When libraries become an election issue
Jatin Lalit Singh, a law student, decided to go and volunteer with these libraries in Delhi on weekends. Over a period of time, he saw how one child who came to the library evolved as a person, became less shy and more confident.
This made Singh decide he wanted to start a community library in Bansa, the village where he grew up, in Hardoi district of Uttar Pradesh. The Bansa library is so successful that the neighbouring villages all want such a library for themselves. In panchayat or village council elections in 2020, candidates in some neighbouring villages promised libraries!
Singh, now a 23 year old practising lawyer in Delhi, says the students who visit his libraries say they feel much happier there than in school. Nobody tells them what to to read. However, they are so used to being told what to do that many demand tasks.
For teenage students, the Bansa library is a space to prepare for competitive exams without migrating to cities like Lucknow. The library also holds talks and discussions where students are encouraged to think beyond government jobs and explore self-employment ideas like law.
A growing revolution
The libraries run by Singh and Koshy are now part of an all-India association, the Free Libraries Network, that does things like jointly negotiate with publishers for a discounted price. There are currently 80 libraries in this network, from Assam to Tamil Nadu, and Koshy expects the number to double by the end of this year.
What’s common in all these libraries is that people actually come, they join, they read. Thousands of people. The idea that people don’t want to read is belied. There is a huge unmet demand.
One successful library inspires another. In Hathras in western Uttar Pradesh, police officer Vineet Jaiswal has started a library in the compound of a police station. Among other things, he hopes people will pick up books on law and read them to be better informed citizens.
What I’m looking forward to the most to is a library that an old schoolmate is starting in Lucknow, currently under construction on a piece of land his family owns. We must all contribute to this silent revolution with our time, financial donations or just books.
