Bokaro Ispat Library. Picture by Pankaj Singh

Bokaro, Feb. 11: Long before e-books and Google, when reading was a passion that was a little less easier to pursue in this industrial town, the management of Bokaro steel plant had an idea: a library for everybody.

And so in the late’ 70s was born the Bokaro Ispat Library (BIL) that was started by then MD S. Samarpungan who ensured the idea came alive on August 2, 1979 when the foundation stone was laid to build a library building on a 3-acre plot attached to a 20-acre open field in Sector V of Bokaro.

Today, BIL, that has been successfully nurtured by the plant management ever since, has over 1.3 lakh titles across seven branches in the city, including one at the Training and Development Center which specialized exclusively in technical publications concerning the steel and mining industry, along with several popular books on management.

Amrita Verma, a lecturer in English attached to a city college, makes it a point to visit the library at least once a week. “The library has excellent biographies, and books on literature,” she said.

These days, Arun Kumar, a retired senior engineer from the plant, takes his grandchildren to the library. “This is to ensure they develop a habit of reading, whatever it may be, as television has killed it (reading),” he added.

With an annual budget of more than Rs 10 lakh and over 30 staff members, a three-member book buying committee gets readers’ feedback and adds more than a thousand books every year.

The idea is to include latest titles on everything ranging from fiction to management to industry. Apart from these, there are books on economics, history, geography, culture and religion, psychology, philosophy and biographies.

The library also boast of around six dozen magazines from across the globe.

“Today, there are 16,612 registered members, besides hundreds of youths and school students who use the library and its branches for reference work or to flip through our vast collection of magazines and newspapers each day,” said Sheela Demta, the acting chief of communications and public relations officer of Bokaro Steel Plant.

Compared to other libraries in, say, Jamhsedpur, Dhanbad, Girdih, Koderma, Chatra and several bordering towns of Bengal, including Durgapur and Asansol, the Ispat library was perhaps the only one that was being regularly stocked with new and latest publications, said senior librarian P.C. Jha.