After living for 17 years in the US, Chintan Dagli observed two things about the city upon moving back to India—the missing reading culture in kids and inadequate sources of books for them.
Vidhya Thakkar, book blogger & digital marketer
A parent of two young kids, he realised there was a limit to the number of books he could buy for children. Determined to resolve this, in 2021, he started the Library on Wheels Foundation, under which Gyan Library was launched—a colourful van that is filled with books for children, going around the city with pre-designated stops.
“The goal is to promote reading, and we believe that reading is like the key to success academically, socially and personally. So if a kid is good at reading, then they will do good at everything else in the future,” shares Dagli, adding that the goal is to not just promote reading, but also to do so consistently. Unlike a one-off or occasional experience where kids take a book, read it, and are done, Dagli wants it to be a habit that they cultivate.
The library has books for children of all ages up to teenage, and a small segment for adults as well. “We want to encourage parents to read too as that directly influences kids,” says the 38-year-old.
“In Mumbai, there aren’t a lot of libraries, there are no good sources of books for children. Our goal is to give them access, make it easy and not charge any fees for reading,” explains Dagli, who has a full-time job with a tech giant.
The colourful van, carrying around 2,000 books, visits 30 stops from Dahisar to Malad. On any given day, it visits five locations. Currently, there are 13,000 books in circulation. “The locations are pre-decided, so the children from that area will come to that particular spot on time,” he adds.
Children can take up to four books, which they can keep for three weeks and then return them before borrowing more books. The books are bought locally, but a lot of the books are also donated by parents and others in the community. These books in the van are sorted by age group and scanned when borrowed so that information is updates on each borrowed book. The lights inside the van are solar-powered.
“I wanted to automate as much as possible as that makes the process seamless. This data has helped us understand which genres of books and writers are more popular amongst the children,” he shares. Geronimo Stilton, Ruskin Bond, Sudha Murthy and Diary of a Wimpy Kid series are quite popular.
“Gyan Library is doing a phenomenal job of cultivating the habit of reading amongst the younger ones, which in today’s tech-savvy generation is challenging. Chintan is enabling young minds to enter a fabulous world of stories and to provide a platform to pick books for free! I have seen the library in my neighbourhood and watching young ones huddling inside really makes my heart sing,” shares Vidhya Thakkar, book blogger and digital marketer.
