Library for Village Kids: An Initiative of IIT Gandhinagar

Several second year B.Tech students from Indian Institute of Technology-Gandhinagar (IITGn) have set up a mini library for the kids in the age group of 7-15 belonging to far off villages in Gujarat.

The library is set up in Palaj Primary School for 250 students with a total of 100 books. It will has a collection of books of different languages like Hindi, English, and Gujarati. The library consists of both fiction and non-fiction books.

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Setting up of the library has come as a blessing for these village kids, who otherwise do not have any access to library facilities in their area. Most of the kids are very excited and beamed with excitement for the past few days. These students love reading, but the supply of books had always been limited, due to their meager family income. Thanks to the efforts of these IITians, now these kids from the villages have access to read in the library.

Prateek Verma, who took this great initiative, and who is also part of Team Amalthea, said that they will take further initiatives to increase the number of books in the library in due course of time. They will also include course books published by NCERT. Most of the books of the library are now collected by students and from various donors.

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These students had used corrugated cardboard sheets to make chairs and tables, and bookshelves for the library. Right now the library has 3 tables, 12 chairs, and 2 bookshelves. Students said that they had used corrugated paper sheets for the bookshelves, tables, and chairs instead of the wood. These corrugated paper sheets are cheaper, easier to work on, lightweight compared to other materials and wood.

Those students who took active part while establishing the library were Prateek Verma, Rajat Ranjan, Akshat Pachauri, Yash Patel, Rohit Singh and Rajat Goel.