100 Libraries In Every State - This Duo’s On A Serious Literary Mission

“The more that you read, the more things you will know.

The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”

Children around the world have grown up reading the greats of literature – Dr. Seuss, Shel Silverstein, Roald Dahl and Ruskin Bond are only a few of the many examples. Time and time again, the importance of reading is highlighted, especially when it comes to young ones. Yet, and particularly in India, children from low-income communities are denied what is considered a right to books. They never develop the love for reading, purely because they don’t have access to books. Wall O Books is attempting to solve this issue, by building libraries across low-income areas in India, using nothing but a wall.

An initiative of the Crayons of Hope Foundation, Wall O Books was started by Swastika Gurung and Sanjukt K. Saha in 2013, with the simple aim of providing the facilities for children to read books. During the two-and-a-half months of planning their project to the T, Gurung and Saha met with a number of organisations that work with children from low-income areas around India and found that many of them did have libraries, but these were rarely visited by the children. These libraries were seen as dull, dingy spaces that offered no real incentive to read, as such. “We wanted to get these kids excited about reading,” Gurung tells Homegrown. And so, they did.

“So many of the organisations that we visited hardly had space where the kids could read books,” Gurung says. “So we thought, why not use their wall?” This creative decision of theirs was the perfect way to encourage children to read, by making books very easily accessible to them. Furthermore, the wall libraries are built entirely by the children themselves, arming them with tools like leadership, responsibility and cooperation, apart from that of creativity. Gurung describes the entire process that culminates in the building of the library in three steps. They would first invite the organisation to assign a teacher for the library, after which they would train these teachers on how to set up and take forward the libraries. “We thought it was better to train these teachers first, considering most of them were hardly trained, and barely paid,” Gurung explains. After completing the training workshops, the teachers are given a 35 kg kit of 100 books, covering languages like English, Hindi and Bengali - “depending on the languages the children of the organisation are familiar with” - as well as book hangers and a notice board made entirely of recycled jute sacks. “Everything has its meaning,” Gurung says. “We give them 14 days to set up the library with the children, after which we go to the organisations and inaugurate their libraries.”

The common feature that each library initiated by Wall O Books shares with the other is a tree surrounding the wall of books. Made of paper mâché, the tree is a representation of a giver – a characteristic the Wall O Books team think every child should possess. A feedback box is hung in the middle of the tree, in which the children are supposed to put in their review of their book-reading experience after every book they complete, in the form of a drawing, a short paragraph or any other method they choose. “Through the feedback box, we can keep track of whether the kids are actually learning something or not from the books they read. Every month, the teachers read out the feedback put in by the kids, and the best is put up on the notice board. This has been a very effective way of motivating the kids into reading more,” Gurung tells us.

Wall O Books encourages each organisation to assign a ‘little librarian’ for their library, and, in the process, stresses the importance and qualities of being a leader. They children themselves vote for their leader – every aspect of Wall O Book’s library-building process truly does have meaning.

When asked about what the progress of the children they’ve have worked with has been like, Gurung replied, “We can definitely see a change in the children. They’ve become more responsible, more creative, and they’ve begun reading a lot. All of them want their names on the noticeboard.”

The success that Wall O Books has achieved so far – setting up 100 libraries in Calcutta, 59 in Delhi and currently setting up libraries across Arunachal Pradesh – hasn’t been without challenges. “Every day is a challenge,” Gurung tells us. “We’re looking for more volunteers to take this project into their own cities. We aim to cover 1 million children by 2019.”

We asked Gurung about her personal journey that led to establishing Wall O Books with co-founder Saha. “I came to Calcutta to pursue my further studies, and found that things there were completely different from what I was used to. When you come into a new city, you have this desire to belong; a want to be accepted by them. You feel like a stranger to their city. After my graduation, I met the co-founder, Sanjukt...he asked me if I wanted to work with kids. This work gave me a new meaning to life.”

Their mission, now? “To reach out to every child in India and around the world.” Based on their upward trend, we already know that they are immensely close to achieving this dream.

Feature image courtesy of Wall O Books