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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Adventures of the mind -Veena Venugopal
-The Hindu Business Line

Deepalaya, a library in a corner of Delhi, is quietly transforming lives of children by giving them access to books

On Mondays and Fridays it’s easy to find the way to Deepalaya library, you just have to follow the children. Some are still in their school uniforms, most have changed into colourful ‘home wear’; and in groups of twos and threes, with books tucked under their arms, they head to the tiny building where, for the last 16 months, they have discovered that between the covers of a book lie adventures of the mind. The first time I visited Deepalaya, it was a school. The gates of Khirki village are exactly across the road from Delhi’s mall mile — a length which in reality is shorter than a mile — that houses brands with unpronounceable names and unaffordable price tags, and walking into the school from that route is a quick lesson on how topology and sociology can transform in an instant.

When the Right to Education Act was implemented, Deepalaya ceased to be a school. But writer Mridula Koshy and her partner, Michael Creighton, who ran a small library programme in the premises, continued with their sessions. Once a week they would come and read aloud to the kids. For a while they still had about 40 kids coming to the library, but that number began falling rapidly, until some weeks they had only six children attending. “We knew the books were being wasted. So our first impulse was to give them away. We donated about 500 books. Our second impulse was that it was a mistake and we should keep the library running,” Koshy says. In January 2015, they went into the community, knocking door after door and informing the kids that the library would carry on with its activities. The numbers went up rapidly, from 40 to 80 to 100, within days.

My second visit to Deepalaya was after it became a library minus a school. Google maps routed me through the narrow alleys and bylanes of Panchsheel Vihar, and driving through pathways not originally meant for four-wheelers, past tiny houses where migrant workers and their families lived, what was immediately evident was the kind of transformation that a library like Deepalaya can make in a place like that. Away from the shiny, reflective glass of the malls, living the life of being invisible cogs in an indifferent city, the only succour is the power of a story. And Koshy, who has spent her life writing, was best placed to not just recognise it, but execute it as a model that is truly transformative.

As the number of children grew, the challenges in running the programmes multiplied. Koshy and Creighton decided to set up a robust volunteer programme. The library is open four days a week; books are given out on Mondays and Fridays. On an average Monday, they have 180 kids. On a busy Monday, that number climbs as high as 220 in the span of four hours. As many as thirty-six volunteers, apart from one staff member — Koshy herself — manage a total of 600 kids, 6,000 books and all the programmes.

As successful as the library has been in giving children access to books, what it really does is serve as a place where answers to puzzling questions — on paper and in life — can be found. The read-aloud programmes help the kids understand structure and motives. “It makes them confident, about themselves as well as about literature. Reading gives them a sense of identity, a hook to the past,” Koshy says.

The enhanced confidence of Deepalaya’s readers is immediately visible. An important tenet of the library is its student council members. Picked from among the users, the eight-member student council not just helps with running the library in an orderly fashion, but is now also empowered to envision the future of the library. I meet Ritika Sharma, Nunihar Khatun, Simpy Sharma, Shivam Kumar Singh and Shivani Sharma, over a tenuous Skype call. Eloquent and clear-headed, they serve as both helpers in the library as well as its evangelists. Singh, 13, tells me that now it is important for parents to join the library. The community walks, of late, have been targeted at them. His favourite book is Tintin, he says, and while he’s always dreamed of being an engineer, reading books in the library has given him “the confidence that he can actually pursue his dream.”

Ritika Sharma, also 13, another student council member, demonstrates a maturity far beyond her years when she says that not only has her power of imagination expanded, she has also learned that whatever you do, you must always do with love.

Koshy’s dream is for the library to serve as a blueprint for other libraries in other communities. A second branch of Deepalaya is already operational, a third is coming up. “That’s one a year. With that kind of numbers, we don’t even scratch the surface. My grand dream is that we create a model which can be replicated by volunteers anywhere else.” With all the programmes it organises, Deepalaya needs a budget of Rs. 10 lakh annually. Currently, most of this comes from individual donations.

To state that spending a few hours a week in the Deepalaya library will transform the adult lives of the kids who use it is merely a summation of hope, not a scientific extrapolation of cause-and-effect.

That literature needs readers is a given. But what a couple of hours spent wandering through Deepalaya provides is ample evidence that with a nudge in the right direction, it is possible to create readers who will always need literature.
 
The Hindu Business Line, 15 April, 2016, please click here to access