For The Love of Reading
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ENGAGING MINDS A teacher at an HRF liabrary in Banglore holds a book discussion session with the kids. Activities to get the children interested is an important part of Malhotra's model
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In the urban poor areas, these libraries are already making a difference. Children’s reading levels are up between 30 and 70 percent. The partnership with Akshara Foundation has now ended, but the Foundation has set up 1,410 libraries across Karnataka based on what it learned through the initial exercise together. HRF, on its part has added 150-odd libraries to the initial 52. Its catalogue is now available for books in five languages (Kannada, Tamil, Urdu, English and Hindi). It is also trying to enlist corporates like Cisco and ArcelorMittal as sponsors.
Now, Malhotra wants to expand the library network to rural areas. That idea took shape in January 2009 after he met D.M. Sridhar, governing board member, Grama — an NGO that works on issues of employment and microfinance. Sridhar had heard of HRF’s work with government schools and suggested Malhotra work with rural schools as well.
Sridhar’s experience with local self help groups has helped Malhotra develop a slightly different model that will get the rural community actively involved in running a children’s library.
Both are clear that the rural model has to be a micro-enterprise solution.
The librarian — someone from the village — “owns” the library. She raises Rs. 5,000 from a self help group to set it up in her own home, or in a room given by the panchayat. She gets 150 books in the GBR catalogue and HRF trains her. Like in the government school model, the child pays a membership fee of Rs. 10 a month. This will help the librarian break even within 18 months.
“Many of [the villagers] do not want to leave their village, and this position gives them the role of a teacher, which means respect,” says Malhotra.
Two women in the Chitradurga district in North Karnataka tried this model in July, 2009. Saranamma, in Bosadevarahatti, saw her start-up organisation receive 70 members. In three months, she was back asking for more — she wanted computers.
Illustration: Abhijeet Kini
This sent Malhotra back to the drawing board, as it would be impractical to provide a computer for each library. HRF is now working on a model that will include an education centre — the Hippocampus Learning Center (HLC), which, unlike HRF, will be a for-profit organisation. This will be a place where children can spend time after school hours; they can read, draw, colour, learn and use a computer. It will serve as a hub for a cluster of 40 villages, each with their own libraries. However, this will cost the librarian and the children a little more.
Malhotra expects a fee to be charged to the librarian. She will pay HRF a little over 10 percent of the fee collected from the children after an initial three month period. This will help HRF recover the cost invested into the programme and help it continue providing material, training, and books. Malhotra believes that by doing so, you shift the cost of ownership to the librarian and this will drive the way she performs. That, he says is a lesson drawn from having put Rs. 40,000 of his own money into the urban government schools library project, only to have people give him excuses why libraries did not work.
He claims an initial investment of Rs. 1.4 crore through angel investors, and is confident that the initiative will pay off. He has nine people on the ground in the Mandya and Davangere districts of Karnataka. Their sole purpose is to advocate the cause for a community library. Malhotra expects to have 20 libraries by September this year, and expects that number to grow to 2,000 in three years.
Kumaraswamy C., who used to work with Prakruti, an organisation that partnered with HRF, says, “[HRF] is used to promoting informal self-learning, and this has been received well by the community as they see it as a community managed centre, and not something outsiders set up.”
But not everyone is comfortable with the idea of HRF charging the librarian a fee. Development workers on the ground say that any initiative in the rural sector can work only when it is run by the people and for the people. A fee like this still has the feel of an outsider in the village.
Sridhar too differs with Umesh on this point. “Right now, there is no understanding to have a payment. This is supposed to work on a self-scalable model. There should be no financial involvement of Grama or HRF.”
As the library network grows, another issue HRF will face is planning, says Sangeetha Menon, fund raiser, HRF. To build scale, HRF needs to be able to transplant a templatised model for each new library. But each locality presents its own unique problems that require customisation, which could slow down the roll-out. For example, “In one government school, the NGO came back to us and said the content in our books placed too much importance on the mother. Most children in that school, for some reason, did not have mothers, and so we changed the book list for that school,” says Menon.
Also, though HRF has a catalogue of books in five languages, not many children’s books are available in languages like Oriya or Bengali. So, setting up libraries in such states will be a challenge.
Malhotra is aware that the ground they have to cover is large. “I have learned an immense amount of patience since we started HRF,” he says.
He may have to hold on to his patience to see HRF’s goals through in India, but recently he got some encouragement that his chosen path can make a difference. Room to Read, a global NGO that has some 10,000 libraries across Nepal, Sri Lanka, Cambodia and Vietnam, invited HRF to train their librarians in Cambodia on how to engage the child, and techniques of running a good library.
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