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Village Libraries Movement – by Balaji Sampath
Various efforts have been supported towards creating a village library for children and neo-literate women. The cost of books makes the village library to be quite expensive at the start. Moreover there aren’t enough cheap but good books available in Tamil – particularly for children and neo-literate women. There is a need to prepare and print these materials. But without a large library base already present, working on merely printing of these materials is a problem. We have therefore here a catch-22 situation. This programme hopes to break this and start off a large scale library movement.
We are just starting this library programme in about 2000 villages in Tamilnadu. The total cost of the library programme is about Rs. 15/month per village. One may wonder “What kind of library programme is this and what can possibly be done with Rs. 15/month?” Do read on…
Overall Goals
- To create a sustainable library and media network which pro-actively reaches out to people all over the state. The starting scale should be in the order of 2000 villages and in its full-fledged form the network should directly reach out to at least 10,000 villages and should be able to run entirely on locally generated funds.
- To ensure continuous production of progressive educational materials - both Reading and Visual materials. These should be low-cost, high-quality materials so that a wide section will not only read it, but will be willing to also buy it.
Sustained literacy efforts start with providing continuous reading materials to the women and children. It has been proven that children learn to read more effectively when reading words than alphabets and efforts such as Makkal Palli Iyakkam use simple stories for primary school children to improve their reading level. Initial efforts at creating library have not been completely successful, as the cost of books and the library space makes it quite expensive. For example, one library with 200 books will cost at least Rs. 4000 per village just for the books. The total book cost for 2000 libraries comes to Rs. 80 Lakhs! In addition, the books will need to be replenished regularly. In addition, good quality books need to be created with different levels of complexity to target different reading levels among children and women. This becomes quite difficult to support in a sustained manner unless there is large amount of capital available. Alternatively, a simpler and cheaper alternative is to create two page stories, activities and current affairs which can be produced regularly and printed in a single A4 sheet paper. Reusable plastic folders can be provided so that the stories can be protected from wear and tear during reading. These can be implemented with no infrastructure costs and with volunteer work from these villages. With a cost of Rs 4 lakhs per year, effective libraries can be run in villages at a total cost (reading material, shipping + programme support) of Rs 16 per village per month. The actual program phases are given below.
1st Phase: Library Cards: The program in the first phase will consist of creating 40 clusters of 50 villages each totaling 2000 villages. The program will be implemented in villages where we are running Arogya Iyakkam, Makkal Palli Iyakkam centers and self help groups. 16 transparent plastic folders will be provided to each of these libraries. Every 2 months, 16 short stories and fun activities will be created by AID-India-TNSF Chennai team and volunteers from other organizations and sent to these village libraries. A village activist will be selected to run this program, conduct meetings and discuss the stories. The activist will also record the stories being read in the villages and the names of those who read the stories in a register. From these registers, periodic reports can be made on the number of people being reached towards this effort. A state full time coordinator will be responsible for ensuring that stories are being produced, printing and monitoring the program in the first phase. State level workshops and camps will be conducted every 6 months.
2nd Phase: Village Books Library: Once basic reading habit and circulation of the materials is in place, we can move on the Phase II. We need to select only the best functioning card libraries for this phase. Here the villagers collect money for the library and buy a set of highly subsidized but good books (100 books) which they use in the library. Otherwise, things proceed as in the earlier phase. Every month, the librarian collects Rs.2 from each member. Every 6 months this total (2 x 30 x 6 = Rs. 360) is sent to us and we send the library a set of new books. During this phase, the central team has to scale up to produce a lot of good quality books along with the 16 sheets. Regular production of progressive children’s comics should also start at this stage. Libraries in this phase can also start off a toy library for children. Each library in this phase must start monthly activities including occasional video and slide shows conducted by the voluntary district/block team.
3rd Phase: Library Cluster and Media Network: Where there is a cluster of 15-20 active Phase II libraries, this new phase can be initiated. For every 15 library cluster, we support a fulltime resource person. This person is trained on video screening, slide screening, book-reading, dramas, organizing melas and festivals, etc. This person is given an initial set of 800 books, a large set of toys for children, a VCD player, a slide projector, slides, VCDs, etc. She provides each library with a set of books from her collection and after a while keeps exchanging it from one village to the next. Once every two weeks, she organizes activities in the villages, conducts slide and video shows, adolescent and health classes, science classes, holds discussions, has reading aloud sessions, encourages people to form support networks, motivates them to start volunteer branches, start youth projects, etc. While most of the material sent will be education, science, health and stories, once in a while pamphlets, VCDs, stories and books on current issues will also be sent. These can generate a lot of discussion. Sensitization materials on issues like caste, gender, inequality, poverty, etc will also sent and programmes conducted.
4th Phase: The fourth phase will involve creating a local network with systematic engagement with local libraries, teachers and other groups. At this scale, we are also talking of large scale social reach and impact. With 10,000 villages and 1000 people in each village – we will have a direct reach to 1 crore people. Using cable channels and other means we can triple this reach. Tamilnadu has a total population of about 6 crore. We are therefore effectively talking about an alternate media network that is set up through this process. Of course even half way down this scale, we will have other problems to contend with – political, technological and managerial problems but that is all part of the game.
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