AT a time when the Raja Rammohun Roy Library Foundation (RRRLF) is celebrating the 25th year of its existence, the institute is having to answer questions about its future.
AT a time when the Raja Rammohun Roy Library Foundation (RRRLF) is celebrating the 25th year of its existence, the institute is having to answer questions about its future.
AT a time when the Raja Rammohun Roy Library Foundation (RRRLF) is celebrating the 25th year of its existence, the institute is having to answer questions about its future.
The RRRLF has an annual budget of around Rs 4 crore. In addition to aiding about 400 major state and district libraries in the purchase of books, the RRRLF arranges seminars, provides furniture, audio and video cassettes and also builds libraries. The purchase of books is supervised by RRRLF in consultation with the state public library committee. A book selection committee clears proposals for purchases as publishers send their products to the Foundation.
The RRRLF, to provide means of higher and technical education at grassroot levels, had hitherto arranged for the purchase of expensive books in English to help students. Out of its annual book purchases worth around Rs 3 crore on average, 80 per cent was spent on books in English and the rest on books in Indian languages. But the tenure of foundation director P.K. Jai-swal saw a marked shift towards purchase of books in Hindi. An official of the RRRLF revealed that between 1992 and 1995, "the foundation purchased Rs 2.14 crore worth of Hindi books, of which Rs 105.16 lakh worth of books went to Kerala, without any survey regarding reading habits, of general demand or prospects of utilisation, or actual requirements in these states."
The outcome has been predictably disastrous. Librarians and staff from Tripura, Nagaland, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka protested that there were no readers for the loads of Hindi books which were needlessly occupying precious storage space.
It has also set off strong anti-Hindi feelings in the eastern and north-eastern states and generated heated protests from Tamil Nadu and other regions. Says Asit Roy on behalf of the Ekushe Parishad, a body formed in the aftermath of the 1952 language movement in east Pakistan: "We do not oppose Hindi or any other language. But any effort to impose it, in addition to the obliteration of other regional languages on TV or radio, would be resisted strongly by all non-Hindi states. Enough is enough."