The library that opens on Sunday

The headmaster of MPPS Ankapur, K. Sathyanarayana, asked us in early 2024 whether he could open the school library on Sunday mornings for anyone in the village who wanted to come. We said yes mostly because we could not think of a reason to say no. We assumed a handful of children would turn up. The register from the last quarter says otherwise: an average of thirty-one people a Sunday, of whom roughly a third are adults. Eleven of those adults cannot read. They come because their children read to them. There is a woman in her fifties who has come to forty of the forty-four Sundays since it opened. She sits at the back with her granddaughter, who is in Class 3, and they work through one picture book a week. She told our volunteer that she had never been inside the school building before, in sixty-one years of living two hundred metres from it. The operational cost of this is a teacher's Sunday morning and about ₹400 a month in electricity. The gram panchayat pays the electricity. Sathyanarayana takes the Sunday himself and will not accept an honorarium for it, which we have stopped arguing about. We have started asking every school we work with whether they would consider the same thing. Four have said yes. Two have said the building is not secure enough on a Sunday, which is a fair answer and a different problem. The rest have said they will think about it, which in our experience means ask again in six months.