National Highway

“South Delhi doesn’t have a single public library,” someone told me, “Can you believe this?” I couldn’t. A little asking around and there I was in Sarojini Nagar, standing before a three-storey building of CPWD-style ugliness. Walk into it and the ambience is every bit as sarakari as you’d expect – and yet it’s full of people. Annual membership: Rs. 2 only.

It’s the head office of, and the biggest library amongst the chain of Delhi Public Libraries run by the Ministry of Tourism and Culture (www.dpl.gov.in). They claim to stock 14 lakh books in a zonal library, 3 branches, 23 sub-branches, 6 community libraries 123 deposit stations, 23 resettlement colony libraries and a braille library. From Dakshin Puri and Seelam Pur to the south Delhi neigbourhoods of Jor Bagh and Lodi Estate, from Nand Nagri in East Delhi to Karol Bagh in the north, it would seem that no part of Delhi is untouched by them. Yet, what they achieve in scale, they fritter away in quality.

All publishers in the country are mandated by a 1954 law to send the Sarojini Nagar library a copy of every book they publish. From advanced Java software books to coffee tablers on Delhi, from leather-bound collected works of Virgil and Plutarch to the latest Indian Writing in English, there are few subjects on which they don’t have anything. There are Urdu and Punjabi books too, but a little nauseating is the emphasis on didactic Hindi books on desh and dharma, and books by santris and mantris. You can see the influence of the national integration types, but must even the English section of the DPL’s Old Delhi branch have a poster urging you to read and write in Hindi?

In the smaller libraries run by the DPL, only the Hindi and the national integration type books are to be found, that too very few in number. The Lodi Road branch, for instance, is a small room with a rickety fan, where a man sits idle all day. The few hundred books they have are not even catalogued. The DPL hasn’t heard of any such thing as computer cataloguing, although their annual Rs. 3 crore budget for books includes computers. (The DPL director, Mr Banwari Lal, was perpetually busy in meetings and his PA was of the opinion that City Limits will have to take permission before we can write about their library!) At these neighbourhood reading rooms, a few men stroll every day in and read the papers. Occasionally the dust-laden books steel shelves feel the human touch, only to be rejected like an ugly match.

Another chain of libraries is the MCD-run Hardayal Municipal Public Library, the head branch of which is opposite the Old Delhi Railway Station. This began as the Lawrence Institute Library in Kachcha Bagh in 1862, a repository of books deposited by Englishmen who read them in the seven or eight months -long voyage to India. In 1912, Lord Hardinge was passing by Chandni Chowk on an elephant when Lala Hardayal hurled a bomb at him. The Viceroy escaped and English officers commemorated the incident by erecting a larger building and shifting the library there. It was called the Hardinge Library. Lala Hardayal could avenge the insult only in 1970.

Their shelves have held together for decades some 1,70,000 books (and counting) in Hindi, English, Urdu, Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit and Prakrit. The oldest book the library has is Relation of Some Years by Travaile Begvenne, written in 1634. Such rare books here are laminated with help from the National Archives. It is not surprising that old books are out of bounds for members, but the Hardayal Library does not let members browse through any bookshelf at all. You have to search the title in the catalogue and ask them for it. “In an open access access there is a lot of wear and tear,” says librarian Madhukar Rao.

The Hardayal Municipal Public Library has 23 branches across the city – ranging from Azad Market to Rani Bagh, from Tri Nagar to Begumpur. Twenty three branches and only 1,463 members. The British Council Library has one branch with 12,000 members. “Do you know how much money they have?” asks Madhukar Rao.

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Hardayal Municipal Public Library, Gandhi Ground, Delhi 110006. Phone: 23963172. Nearest metro station: Chandni Chowk. MembershiP: Rs. 100 a year, plus a security deposit of Rs. 200. Life membership: Rs. 1,000.

Delhi Public Library, H-Block, Sarojini Nagar, New Delhi-110023 Ph: 24101261, 24670290 Fax:24673220

Email : dpl@dpl.gov.in, delhipubliclibrary@gmail.com
Website: http://www.dpl.gov.in
Annual membership: Rs. 2

(An edited version of this article by me has appeared in Delhi City Limits, a supplement of Outlook magazine.)