Reclaiming readers: Bringing books back to living rooms

“There are many little ways to enrich a child’s world. Joy of reading is the best of them.”

India’s education discourse has, for long, centred on access — access to schools, to textbooks, to digital infrastructure. These are critical, but as we stand at the threshold of a new phase in Indian education, an equally urgent question that confronts us is:

Are we raising a generation that reads?

It is this question — deceptively simple, consequential in its implications — that gave birth to the Rashtriya e-Pustakalaya (ReP) or the National Digital Library. The platform was conceived not merely as a digital archive, but as a living effort to enrich India’s reading culture from within the home, the school and the community. Today, ReP hosts over 7,000+ carefully curated books across 23 languages, developed in partnership with hundreds of publishers and aligned with the vision of the National Education Policy 2020.

Removing barriers, not replacing habits

For many children across India — particularly in rural, semi-urban, and underserved regions — access to books beyond the prescribed textbook remains a genuine constraint. The nearest bookshop may be many kilometres away. The school library may be stocked with titles that are dated, or it may not be available beyond school hours. For these children, the imagination is willing but the material is not there.

Rashtriya e-Pustakalaya addresses this gap: a child, regardless of geography or income, can now reach into a library of thousands through the device already in their home. For anytime, anywhere reading. It also gives an opportunity to access books in languages beyond Hindi and English.

But it is equally important to be clear about what this initiative is not.

As a society, we must ask ourselves a simple but searching question: can we reclaim a fraction of passive screen consumption and return it to productive reading? The answer, we believe, is yes — if we make the books available, make them inviting, and make reading feel like a choice rather than a chore.

Working with educators: The next phase

As Rashtriya e-Pustakalaya enters its next phase, the centrality of educators cannot be overstated. Teachers, librarians, and school leaders are not simply facilitators of learning — they are culture builders. The reading habits a child forms in school often persist for life. The books a librarian recommends can change the direction of a young person’s thinking.

Meaningful integration of ReP into school life will require deliberate effort across several dimensions:

• Revitalising library classes as active learning spaces, not supervised study halls
• Encouraging guided reading and storytelling sessions where teachers share their own favourite books
• Creating peer-led book discussions and reading circles that give students ownership of the habit
• Embedding reading into the daily rhythm of school life, so that it feels as natural as morning assembly
• Improving writing skills by understanding various methods of writing.

A living, evolving library

Unlike the traditional library — fixed in its shelves and constrained by its physical dimensions — Rashtriya e-Pustakalaya is designed to be dynamic. It is a treasure of books in your hands. It also gives readers the opportunity to express what other books should be added. The available books are also about the rich heritage and culture of Bharat, which the young generation should know about.

A collective responsibility

Ultimately, the success of Rashtriya e-Pustakalaya will not be determined by the number of downloads or registered users, important as those signals are. It will be determined by whether reading becomes a habit once again — in homes, in schools, in the quiet corners of Bharat’s extraordinary diversity of communities. It’s when a child in a remote area has eyes twinkling when she reads a book she has only heard about.

A national call to read

The platform also keeps hosting activities like the current ‘Rashtriya Kavya Utsav’ and a call for citizens to contribute to storytelling. A lot more fun and engaging activities will be a continuous part of the Rashtriya e-Pustakalaya.

India has always been a civilisation of stories. From the oral traditions that preceded the written word to the great literary canons of Hindi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Bengali, Marathi and a dozen other tongues. This land has never been short of narrative. What is at risk today is not the stories themselves, but the habit of seeking them out — the willingness to sit still, to follow a sentence, to give a book the time it asks for.

Archana Sharma Awasthi is Additional Secretary, Department of School Education and Literacy, Ministry of Education, Government of India.  Yuvraj Malik is Director, National Book Trust. India; Views presented are personal.