Mumbai

As children and elders alike get hooked on mobiles for entertainment and scanty book reading, a Mumbai woman’s initiative to launch a library in her native Bihar village is bringing about the change in peoples’ mindset about education.

Sadia Sheikh has set up a library in Deora, a small village of 3,500 people in Bihar’s Darbhanga district to address peoples’ lack of interest in sending their children to school. Interestingly, Sadia, a student of Sheikh Rizvi College, says she does not believe “there is an alternative to the library; it is as important as it was yesterday.”

She had gone to her village during the Covid-induced lockdown in June last year where to her dismay she found parents lacking in interest in their children’s education. She also realized that Deora’s literacy rate was as low as 40 percent.

With the help of her family and relatives, Sadia Shaikh set up a community library and named it as Maulana Azad Community Library. She wanted to create a space where children would feel an environment for school children to get interested in books.

She started this library with around 500 books on October 1, 2020. Today it has more than 1500 books.

Since Sadia didn’t have enough money to buy all the books, she asked the locals to donate them. The villagers donated books on literature, story books for children and religious books - most being tarbhar board (classes one to twelve) textbooks.

Students attending classes in Library

Students who were not enrolled into schools were encouraged to come to library and studied there

The library subscribes to a Hindi and Urdu language newspaper each.

Sadia Shaikh says that since she went to her village during the Covid lockdown she managed to set up the library.

Sadia said, “When she joined the protests during the CAA, NRC protests, I realized that we need to work on the education front.”

"I thought I couldn't open a classroom, I couldn't open a school, but I could do a small job on my own for village education, I could open a community library," she said.

Sadia Sheikh’s parents moved to Mumbai for work. She cleared her tenth standard and religious education from Muhammadiyah University, Malegaon.

Sadia says that a lot of work needs to be done at the level of education in rural Bihar where, she realized, parents were generally not serious about the education of their children. She wanted to create an environment through the library where learning will be fun and a community activity.

Library, she said, also brought together people with similar ideas and motivation.

Sadia said, “We have approached several NGOs for new newspapers, magazines and other library expenses. Some have even contributed."

She conducts evening  classes for children in the age group of 5-7 years in the library. Her target is to rope in those who are out of the school. Initially, there was not much response. However, soon children and elders started pouring in for the evening class.

She would pick children who were not enrolled in school from lanes and fields and bring them to the library. She gave craft paper and colours to them to make the class all fun.

The library has a basic classroom, where children are taught alphabets, numbers in their own language. At present 15 children regularly attend this class.

After Sadia returned to Mumbai, she handed over the responsibility of the library to Mukhtar Sahab (45), her relative. She said since his house is close to the library and as he is a teacher in a madrasa, he is running it efficiently.