A few books hung on a piece of rope held in place by three bricks were all that 12-year-old Utpal Das needed to become a poet and fiction-writer. In little more than two months, he has penned seven poems and three short stories. His fourth work of fiction — developed from Pithar Mel (‘Meeting of sweet rice cakes’), a poem from a book picked up from the school-library-on-rope — has been selected for the wall magazine of his lower primary school on Jail Road in the outskirts of Assam’s Barpeta town, about 95 km from Guwahati.
It’s exciting
Utpal, in Class V, is from Karertal village. His classmate, Rajeda Khatun, from the same village, has become an advocate of wildlife conservation after reading books where animals are the central characters. Both boys found these books from their school’s unique library, a wall with ropes strung across it, to which the books are clipped. The wall separates the teachers’ room from a storeroom.
“We got some books from Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) 10-12 years ago, but they were kept in trunks and taken out only when required. Insects and damp damaged them. The hanging library, introduced in our school in August, has worked wonders,” says Chandana Pathak, who takes turns with six other teachers at conducting reading classes with library books for at least two hours a week.
The 56 students at Paschim Kholabhanda L.P. School, on an island in the Brahmaputra, had never seen a library before. The new hanging library in their flood-prone school has generated much excitement.
Rediscovering talent
“When we pioneered the hanging library concept in Barpeta district six-seven months ago, the idea was to make the books visible in order to arrest the declining reading habit among students, which was affecting their learning. We have so far put up such libraries in 190 schools,” says Thaneswar Malakar, Barpeta’s Deputy Commissioner and a former Mission Director of SSA. The district has 1,697 lower primary schools, 303 middle-level schools, and 301 secondary schools.
The hanging idea serves another purpose; it keeps the books safe during floods. Madhyachar Kholabandha L.P. School, for instance, gets inundated regularly during floods even though it is built on higher ground. With the books hanging high, water can’t reach them.
Measures such as the hanging library have helped Barpeta leave other districts of Assam behind in adding value to education across government schools. “The new ideas are working to the extent that many students are leaving private schools,” says Kapil Das, headteacher of Suliyakata Adarsha L.P. School in Barpeta.
The school drop-out rate has come down too, and frequent visits by officials to far-flung schools to assess the impact of the programmes have checked child marriage to some extent.
Students are not the only beneficiaries of this change in the way education is imparted. “Teachers are rediscovering their talents in singing, playing an instrument, dancing, acting, painting and various sports,” says Jyotsna Rani Barman, the district inspector of schools for Barpeta.
The artistic abilities of the teachers are coming together with the gift of imagination of students like Utpal to make learning fun in Barpeta.
rahul.karmakar@thehindu.co.in
