Four books and a 1994 telephone directory

In July 2016 we drove a hired tempo from Hyderabad to Wardhannapet with four hundred second-hand story books in the back, because a schoolteacher we had never met had told a friend of a friend that his children had nothing to read. He was not exaggerating. MPPS Kothapally had four books in the building that were not textbooks. Three were donated encyclopaedia volumes, A to C, and the fourth was a 1994 Warangal district telephone directory. All four were in a locked steel almirah in the headmaster's room, because that is where things that might get spoiled are kept. That almirah is the whole problem, and it took us three years to understand it. Books in a village school are treated as property to be protected rather than as material to be used, because the school is answerable for them and nobody is answerable for whether a child reads. So the books stay locked, the children stay outside, and the audit is satisfied. What changed at Kothapally was not the number of books. It was that in 2019 the headmaster, K. Yadagiri, agreed to two things: a protected forty-five-minute reading period every Saturday that no other subject could eat into, and a rule that any child could take any book home overnight without asking anyone. He expected to lose a third of the collection in the first year. He lost eleven books, nine of which came back later. Today that school has 840 titles on open shelves, colour-coded by reading level, catalogued and reshelved by the Class 5 children themselves. In our most recent assessment, 63% of Class 5 students there could read a Class-2 level paragraph. In 2018 the figure was 21%. We have opened eighteen more libraries since. Every one of them starts with the same conversation about the almirah.