Anuradha Nagaraj writes about how rural libraries have been taking the extra effort to reach out to children who had no access to them.
Via Open
“It’s the best thing that could have happened to these children,” says HP Siddharaju, headmaster of a government higher primary school in nearby Arralikatai village. “Now in the evenings, instead of running wild and staying out till late at night, the village children, including those who don’t study in this school, come to the library. The access to good reading material gives them access to the world of reading and it has impacted their performance in school also.”
The Akshara Foundation first started its reading programme in 2006 in government schools in Bangalore urban district. It began by redefining what a library meant. “The library is not just about borrowing books; we wanted it to be a multi-functional space linked to classroom learning,” explains Ashok Kamath, chairman of the foundation.
Akshara started by creating simple laminated reading cards that a child could also take home. Like Hippocampus, it developed library-related activities, got storytellers to spin yarns for the children and at the end of five years achieved “significant results”.
“Between the first phase of the programme and a follow through the mop-up phase, nearly 86 per cent of the children were converted to ‘reader’ category, [having] acquired the ability to read unknown sentences or paragraphs,” says Kamath, adding that most of the libraries have now been handed back to the government to run.
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