The Calcutta Municipal Corporation has asked people to donate children’s books to the 224 schools run by the civic body.
The list of schools is available on the CMC’s website. The books — children’s storybooks, primers, fables and others — can be donated till October 10. The books will be used to set up libraries in some of the schools.
The Facebook handle of the CMC has a QR code that can be scanned to see the list of schools.
“One can just walk into any of the schools and donate books. We have decentralised the collection since people will find it easier to give the books near home,” said Sandipan Saha, mayoral council member in charge of the CMC’s education department.
There are 224 CMC schools, with classes from Nursery to V, which have close to 15,000 students. Not all the schools have their own building — many buildings house two schools that run in shifts, in the morning and in the afternoon.
Saha said most students in these schools come from low-income families where the culture of reading is often not prevalent. These children rarely develop the habit of reading storybooks and cannot afford to buy such books either.
“We have seen that our students read very little apart from textbooks. The culture of reading beyond textbooks has not grown in them probably,” said Saha.
A repository of such books could help the children develop the habit of reading, Saha said.
“In comparatively better-off families, many books for children are thrown away when the child grows up. We are urging citizens not to sell or throw away these books but to donate them to our schools so our children can read them,” he said.
About 15 of the CMC schools have old libraries. In two more, libraries with modern tools were set up recently.
“We want to set up libraries for children in all our schools. That is not going to happen overnight. It will take time. But with books we can start setting up libraries in some more schools,” said mayor Firhad Hakim, while launching the book donation drive on Friday.
There are about 850 teachers for the 15,000 students in the CMC-run schools. Asked whether the number of teachers was adequate, Saha said some schools that had very few students had the same number of teachers as the ones with many more students.
“We have merged some schools that have a low enrolment with schools with more students. Students from a school with a few children have been admitted to nearby schools that have more pupils. Teachers, too, have been shifted to the merged school or sent to another school that has a demand for more teachers,” he said.
