Bansa Community Library & Resource Centre

Bansa Community Library & Resource Centre is established under Bansa Educational Society, which is a registered society under Societies Registration Act, 1860, working in the field of Education since 2014. It is the first community library in Bansa Village of Hardoi District (UP).

This initiative is started by a group of Law students led by Jatin Lalit Singh. Abhishek Vyas and Malvika Aggarwal are the co-founders of the Library. Their belief in the idea of reading led to the initiative of Bansa Community Library. Bansa Community Library aims to provide a free place where children & adults can read and study, and issue books. Everyone should have access to books as Books take them into a unique world of imagination and help them in living a better life. This is a basic Right which actually empowers them to exercise their rights. Today’s readers are the thinkers and leaders of tomorrow.

Bansa Community Library is the centre of reading for hundreds of children from around 10-15 districts nearby. We aim at providing low cost books at high standards for their preparations of competitive exams, and inculcate the habit of reading at a very young age.

Our aim is not only to create a reading culture in the area but also to rekindle the spark of curiosity in the mind of young children, and this initiative will give them free space and resources to read and study.

Our Modus operandi:

After spreading awareness about the library and its proposed activities in the area, registrations will be done for those who wish to learn as well as those who wish to volunteer for teaching or library administration. Thereafter, groups would be formed and each teaching activity will be tailor-made keeping in mind the level of the learner. Inputs from educationalists will be sought for this. Both curriculum and pedagogy would be designed in a manner that does not become burdensome for the learners – and wherever possible, integration of art and experiential learning will be done.

IDEA BEHIND THIS INITIATIVE

The idea of starting Bansa Library comes from The Community Library Project. TCLP is a low-cost, citizen-led initiative, and they have 4 working libraries in Delhi and Gurgaon. They are continuously working on the library movement, and they work in the direction of building public libraries which are accessible to all.
Two of our team members were volunteers at The Community Library Project, where they learnt how public libraries should function and how we can ensure maximum participation from children. They have an open-source curriculum and they have developed different ways to help children who are initially slow at reading in building reading fluency.

IMPORTANCE OF FREE LIBRARIES

Reading helps to expand the mind and give us more ideas. Reading also develops the imagination and allows us to dream and think in ways. Allows for creative thinking. Not everyone has access to books and resources to educate themselves but everyone should.

To ensure that each citizen gets equal opportunity, each citizen must have equal access to resources, which can only be ensured by providing these resources for free. A large number of citizens do not have any access to books, and education, even though our Constitution talks about Equality and Right to Education. Every child should have access to books and education, so that they can have dreams, imagination, and make their lives and position better in the future. Libraries bring people closer to books, to their dreams, and each other. That is why there should be more free libraries and free spaces, where people who do not have resources can learn. We often tend to take our ability to reason, a by-product of the resources that surround us, for granted. This tends to come as a surprise to us, for we fail to understand the huge difference that the paucity of quality resources can make in someone’s life, who is probably not as privileged as we are.