Villages set up own libraries with a little help from friends

Villages set up own libraries with a little help from friends

It is a blistering afternoon, but as you enter the community library in Kalda village, located in the Panchayat Ghar in the midst of green agricultural fields, you are buffeted by a gust of cool breeze wafting through its high open doors. About a dozen youngsters sit hunched over books at brand new desks. The library’s iron shelves have books for various competitive examinations. Through its windows, one can see the Eastern Peripheral Expressway (EPE) in the distance. “It is the favourite place of youngsters in the village; they spend most of the time here preparing for various competitive exams,” says Arvind Nagar, a village volunteer, who helps manage the library, which opened in November last year with the money contributed by villagers.

Kalda in Gautam Buddh Nagar district, about 45 km from Connaught Place, is not the only village to have set up a library—in fact, a rural library movement is sweeping across the country. In the past year alone, about 100 libraries with sleek, air-conditioned reading rooms have come up in the villages of Noida, Ghaziabad, Meerut, Bulandshahr, among others as part of Gram Pathshala, a community initiative led by youngsters in these villages. It started last year when a few students in the village approached Lal Bahar, an inspector with National Human Rights Commission, who lives in Ganauli village in Ghaziabad, complaining of a lack of a place to study

“I took up the matter with the villagers and the Gram Pradhan andsuggested that we should open a library in the village. Everyone immediately agreed. We collected 5 lakh rupees through donations from villagers and the library was opened in August last year,” says Lal Bahar.

A month later, Bahar started reaching out to neighbouring villages to encourage them to build similar libraries. The villagers responded with great enthusiasm, and a brand-new library has since been inaugurated in one or the other village of these districts almost every week in Panchayat buildings, which had been out of use for years. On Sunday, Bahar attended the inauguration of the 100th such library in the region, which came up in Kailashpur village in Greater Noida in Gautam Buddh Nagar district.

“Our mission is to open a library in every village of the country, and make Gautam Buddh Nagar the first district to have a library in every village,” says Bahar. “The villagers contribute anything between ₹100 to 20, 000 to set up the library. We only provide encouragement and advice. Now we are getting enquiries from villages in Bihar, Assam and Rajasthan and many other states,” adds Ajay Pal Nagar, who is part of the core team of Gram Pathshala initiative.

A few km away from Kalda village is Koodi Kheda, another village, where about a dozen students are reading inside the library, which was inaugurated in February this year. Like the one in Kalda, this one is also located in the verdant surrounding of Panchayat Ghar, which was renovated for the library. The rustle of the trees is the only sound one hears inside its high-ceilinged reading room, whose walls are adorned with framed posters of national leaders, and many inspiring slogans, one of which reads, “When in doubt, come to the library”.

“We decided to set up the library after the Gram Pathshala team approached our village and told us about their mission. Almost everyone in the village lapped up the idea,” says Arun Nagar, who is part of the village team that manages the library. Sunny Kumar, who is at the library preparing for the SSC GD examination for paramilitary services, adds, “I had no place to study at home. Lack of libraries and a place to study put students in villages at a great disadvantage. I am happy it is no longer the case in our village.”

Indeed, these community efforts are important in a country like India where per capita expenditure on libraries is among the lowest in the world. The US, for example, spends, 35.96 dollars per capita annually on public libraries, but in India it is a meagre 7 paise. According to the 2011 Census, there were 70,817 libraries in rural areas and 4,580 in urban areas serving a population of more than 830 million and 370 million, respectively. While libraries were part of the Census for the first time in 2011, there was no precise information on their condition and service capabilities.

While Ghaziabad-based Gram Pathshala’s movement’s objective is to give village students a convivial space to study, Noida-based organisation, Sarvahitey’s project Paper Bridge, aims to set up 1,000 libraries with the larger objective “to unify India culturally” and reduce a sense of alienation among the geographically isolated communities. Prem Prakash, the co-founder of Paper Bridge, says the organisation has set up over 300 libraries in villages in 11 states of the country, including the Northeast and Kashmir. “We have also set up about 150 libraries in the Naxal- affected rural areas of Jharkhand,” he says.

The organisation runs book donation drives at schools, colleges, corporate houses and has so far collected over 200,000 books. “We encourage people donating books to write a message on them for the people in the region where the books are destined. These messages act as a soft bridge between people; that is why we have named the project Paper Bridge,” he adds.

Among the villages where libraries have come up in the past few years, the most famous is Bhilar, near Mahabaleshwar in Maharashtra. Famous as ‘Pustakanche Gaav’ or ‘Village of Books’, almost every house in this quaint hilly village has a library with about 1,000 books on a particular theme such as history, novel, short story, sports, among others. Large murals on the walls of the house depict the theme of the library it houses.

The libraries in the village, also known as India’s Hay-on-Wye, after the famous Welsh village in the UK known for its literary festival, is a project started by the Maharashtra government in 2017 with the objective of promoting Marathi literature. “We provide books, shelves, tables and chairs to set up libraries in the drawing rooms of these houses. The villagers do not charge us any rent and are welcoming hosts. We keep adding new books to the collection,” says Vinay Mavlankar, the project manager, whose office is located in the Bhilar village, which also organises gala cultural and literary programmes.

“Before Covid-19, we used to receive about 10 visitors a day. The library is part of our house, and so we get an opportunity to have long conversations with visitors about their lives, and literature, enhancing our understanding of other parts of the country and deepening our knowledge of books,” says Vaibhav Bhilare, whose house in the village is titled Kadambari-2, which is home to a library with Marathi novels.

Bhilar has inspired many villages across the country.

One of them is in Perumkulam, near Kollam, in Kerala. The villagers have put several sloped-roof, house-shaped glass bookshelves, with about 50 books each, across the village. Last year, well-known Malayalam writer MT Vasudevan Nair declared it a “village of books”.

In the neighbouring Tamil Nadu, in the past few years, Shiva Shankar, a former professor at the Chennai Mathematical Institute and Asai Thambi Replong, English Literature professor at Pachaiyappa’s College, in Chennai, have been on a mission to set up libraries in Dalit villages across the state. So far, they have set up, 18 libraries in 15 districts, all of them with over 3,000 books. “We wish to create equitable opportunities for rural children and students, and our primary focus are Dalits. We approach the villages and all we ask for is a room in a public or private space and volunteers to run the libraries after we set it up. We want to create at least 100 libraries. Libraries, we believe, are an effective tool of social inclusion and empowerment,” says Replong.

Agrees, Lal Bahar, the man who started the village library movement in western UP. “Libraries can be the key to the social, educational and cultural revival of villages,” he says. “Earlier, in our village when an elderly person saw a youngster loitering around, he would say, ‘what are you doing here, go home; now the elderly villager says, ‘do not waste your time, go to the library.”

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4.12 lakh millionaire households in India, 3,000 with over Rs 1,000 crore

By Express News Service

NEW DELHI: There are a whopping 4,12,000 dollar-millionaire (networth of at least Rs 7 crore) households in India while the number of households that boast a wealth of at least Rs 1,000 crore has been pegged at 3,000 by the Hurun India Wealth Report 2020.

Separately, Hurun has identified a novel household category in India the ‘New Middle Class’that has an average savings of Rs 20 lakh per annum. Hurun pegs the total number of such cumulative households at 633,000. As for the good old ‘Indian middle class’, the number is pegged at 56,400,000.

These are families, according to Hurun, that have earnings of over Rs 2.5 lakh per annum and a net worth of less than Rs 7 crore. While the report did not talk about households that fall below the poverty line, it did note that the country needs to uplift its GDP per capita, which is one of the lowest among major developing nations.

“For the Indian wealth creation story to catapult a moonshot, the GDP per capita should increase from the current levels of $1,876 to $3,000 in real terms. The wealth and prosperity of the general populace would also have a significant impact on the economy as well as the grass-roots level. In that scenario, one would see a highly-competitive penetration of super-luxury brands across the cities in India,” said Hurun India MD and Chief Researcher Anas Rahman Junaid.

Mumbai lead the list of places with the most number of millionaire-households at 16,933, closely followed by New Delhi (16,000), Kolkata (10,000), Bengaluru (7,582), and Chennai (4,685). State-wise, Maharashtra (56,000), Uttar Pradesh (36,000), Tamil Nadu (35,000), Karnataka (33,000), and Gujarat (29,000) account for 46 per cent of the overall millionaire household pie, the report said. When it comes to investment, millionaires prefer listed stocks and real estate over other types of assets.

Why the volatility in dollar-rupee forward premiums

Forward premiums are the interest rate differentials between two currencies. For example, the one year GoI bond yield is 3.92 per cent. At the same time, the US one year treasury yield is 0.05 per cent. Therefore, the difference between the two is 3.87 per cent and the one year forward premium for USD-INR (dollar-rupee) should be maintained at this level, ideally to create a conducive market condition.

Quoted in paise, forward premiums are added to the spot rate of the pair to give the forward rate of the currency pair — for example, if USD-INR is at 72.92 and the forward premium for one year is 320 paise, then the forward rate for one year will be 76.12. This 320 paise, when quoted in terms of annualised premium, is 4.20 per cent, contributing to an imperfect market and an arbitrage opportunity.

The change in forward premiums is caused by the movement of interest rates in the two currencies. Any rise/fall in interest rates in the US or India changes interest rates, and the forward premiums adjust accordingly. In India, the forward premium market is not perfect as we do not have capital account convertibility. While the RBI keeps accumulating dollars and pays the premium in the forward market, it also receives a forward premium when it sells dollars in the forward market.

Arbitrage opportunities

This intervention causes arbitrage opportunities in the market. Higher rates of interest in India also attract traders to receive the differential interest rate between the two countries (the US and India, borrowing in dollar and deploying the rupees generated in Indian debt/equity market). Thus, there is always volatility in the forward premiums. In 2008-09, the forward premiums turned into a discount as the RBI bought all the dollars that were coming as inflows. This created a shortage of dollars and converted the entire forward curve into a discount.

However, the forward premium does not always represent a perfect interest rate differential in our country’s case. The nationalised banks had been receiving premium till March, but the forward premia are usually high at the end of the financial year due to shifting to the new year. The RBI had been buying dollars and started paying heavily in the forward market.

In the first and second week, the spot rose to 75.32 and as the RBI bought dollars and paid forward premia, the near term premium rose. Cash levels went to absurd levels of 28-30 per cent, while the first month premia rose to 8 per cent. The year premium was nearly at 6 per cent. SBI and Canara Bank, the typical receivers of cash premiums, were not receiving the daily premia.

Thus, everybody was a payer, and with no receivers, the premiums remained at elevated levels for about two weeks. Post this, the nationalised banks stepped in on behalf of the RBI and started receiving the premiums and brought it down to normal levels of 5-5.25 per cent for the entire curve. In the past few days, the RBI has been receiving the premiums which has brought down the rate to 3.50 per cent and the one-year premium has been brought down to 4.30 per cent.

The RBI has huge paid positions in the forwards (about $75-80 billion), presumably brought down by receiving in the forward market. We shall come to know about this only in July when the RBI reveals its buy and sell data for the month of May.

A lower-cost will ensure that corporates hedge their payables beyond the near term, say, for more than one month. It will also ensure that the RBI can buy its forwards at a lower rate. On the other hand, increased hedging costs do not induce corporates to hedge their import liabilities except those in the near term despite the spot coming down.

Carry trades

The volatility in forward premia will continue as the RBI keeps paying when it buys dollars and receiving when it sells them. Higher premia will attract carry traders, while low premia will attract importers, with the spot being lower around 72.80 to 73. The exporters should receive higher premia while the importers should pay the current premia at 4.30 per cent for one year.

The RBI will not allow spot to move higher as it will cause imported inflation with oil prices already ruling above $71 a barrel. The range for spot is expected to be between 72 and 74 and the forward premia from 4 per cent to 6 per cent on the one year curve for the month of June. However, the Fed meeting scheduled for June 16 could increase the demand for tapering to start with, causing volatility in spot and premia. This is the most significant risk in recent times.

The RBI will ensure orderly behaviour of the market and will be present from both sides (buying and selling). Importers and exporters should cash in on both the opportunities (by paying at lower levels and receiving at higher levels, respectively) when it comes.

The writer is Head of Treasury, Finrex Treasury Advisors