Getting bookish in Baggilipalli, and other distant places

Free libraries are making readers of children in small towns and villages
Three months ago, 10-year-old Shivansh Maurya made a discovery that would profoundly alter his after-school schedule. He stumbled on storybooks, the way a child raised on yogurt chances upon ice-cream. Such was the pull that he started dropping in almost daily to the Read India community centre in Shahbad Mohammadpur, a semi-urban settlement in Dwarka with a library at its heart.
Sitting alone in the small reading room, his nose buried in a Hindi collection titled Rangbirangi Kahaniyan, he says shyly, "My favourite story is the one about the proud peacock and the wise crane.I like books that have a message."
Across many book-barren parts of India, children are now chasing fantasies and folktales, illustrated histories and encyclopedia, thanks to reading and library programmes run by non-profits.
When in 2012, Read India established its library in Shahbad Mohammadpur, an enclave of tight row-houses near a 2-track railway line, it had to go house to house to persuade families to send their children over, even offering help with their homework. When the children started dribbling in, getting them to read wasn’t a simple matter of handing them a book. The women at the centre – trained in library management – had to devise ways to get the child hooked on a book.
Treasure hunts and musical chairs around books, storytelling sessions and dictionary word search games were employed, and eventually a book club of sorts established. The four-year-old library now has around 30 kids dropping by every day, from teenagers in need of study guides to primary-schoolers.
For Subramanya Shastri, project manager at Agastya International Foundation which has established libraries in 70 villages in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, the goal is to get children to first read and write fluently in their mother tongue before progressing to other languages. "Each library has 150 to 200 books for grades three to ten, in three to four languages based on the local demographic," says Shastri. Unfortunately, books written in regional languages are limited, and translations (from dominant languages) are few he observes.
It’s a problem that seems to have found one solution at least. Last September on World Literacy Day, Pratham Books, the not-for-profit children’s publisher, launched an open-source online platform making available 800 stories in 24 languages, including 20 STEM titles.
The platform, Story Weaver, provides tools to enable readers to translate stories in different languages and scripts, and even rewrite available stories for higher or lower reading levels. It now has over 2,000 stories in 51 languages including Tibetan, Sanskrit, Banjara and Gondi. Their most recent campaign, Freedom to Read, launched this World Literacy Day on September 8, Pratham Books pledges to add 15 new languages to the list.
A few months ago, Tenzin Dhargyal, an English teacher at the Tibetan Children’s Village School in Suja, Himachal Pradesh, started translating Story Weaver’s works in Tibetan. "Most of the books donated to us are in English," he says. To encourage reading in their mother tongue, and supplement the stock of 33 books he and his colleagues have translated on Story Weaver, Dhargyal plans to assign older school children with ‘translation’ homework.
Speaking about the new crop of readers, librarians across the country testify to their confidence peaking, and their comprehension improving. "They’re increasingly speaking in English too, as they grow more certain of their pronunciation," says A Jagdeesa Babu, librarian at Agastya’s centre in Baggilipalli in Andhra Pradesh.
The greatest achievement however is inducing kids to read at all. Back at the Read India library in Dwarka, Anju Gaur, the centre coordinator, says it’s a rare rural or semi-urban school that keeps a library, and even if it has one, it’s often off-limits to students. "They keep their books under lock and key, and just don’t hand them out," she reports. Shivansh, who attends a government school in Dwarka, seconds this. "I’ve never been given a storybook in school," he reports, "I’m not even sure where the library is."
When children write to read
In a couple of places in India, children aren’t waiting to grow up to write their stories. Sixth- to eight-graders in schools in Dahanu (Maharashtra), Khun (Himachal Pradesh) and Kuppam (Karnataka) were taken through story-writing and art workshops organised by the Tata Centre for Technology and Design, IIT-Bombay. Their best works were selected and translated into English. Reading their own stories will assist the language-learning process, believes Alka Hingorani, an associate professor at the Industrial Design Centre at IIT-B. The animated versions of these books will have the children reading out their own stories in English. "We want to transform kids from content-consumers to generators," she adds.