RUBY RAUNIYAR
If the Ministry of Education’s (MoE) new policy is implemented, every government and community school at the primary level will have a library each.The policy comes with the objective of providing primary-level students with not only academic but also practical knowledge.

The Ministry, which is gearing to celebrate the 6th Library Day on August 31 with the slogan of ‘One School, One Library’ has already instructed the District Education Offices to allocate one room for a library in every primary-level school, according to Mahashram Sharma, Spokesperson and Joint Secretary at the MoE.

“We’ve instructed schools to install a library and place books other than those in the curriculum so that the children can develop their reading habits,” Sharma said. “The schools should have storybooks, poems, songs, general knowledge and essay books in their libraries.”

The MoE states that it plans to oversee the establishment of libraries in 153 public schools this fiscal year. Towards this goal, the Ministry has fixed a budget of Rs 60,000 per school and a total sum of Rs 63,180,000, informs Deputy Director, Jaya Prasad Acharya.

The country has approximately 29,000 schools. Statistics state that the MoE has already installed libraries in 3,159 public schools till date.

The government has been celebrating Library Day for the past three years. However, Nepal Library Association celebrated the first Library Day five years ago and it’s only been three years since the Ministry has taken responsibility for the occasion. A committee to celebrate Library Day has been formed under the chairmanship of Narayan Gopal Malego, Secretary of MoE.

The first public library of Nepal was established two hundred years ago, on Bhadra 15, 1869 BS (Nepali year), by the then Shah King Girvan Yuddha Bikram Shah. The library was called Pustak Chitai Tahabil.

According to Baburam Dahal, Coordinator of the Library Day Promotion Subcommittee, there are five different types of libraries in Nepal: National, public, educational, private, and special libraries.

There is one national library and 1,200 public libraries in the country. School and college libraries fall under educational libraries while special libraries mean subject-specific ones.“Most private schools and colleges have libraries,” Dahal said. “But only very few government schools have theirs,” he adds.

source:RAUNIYAR,RUBY (2013),"Compulsory libraries in primary schools", republica,27 August 2013