In Uttar Pradesh’s Hardoi district, with its 19 blocks and 2072 villages, there was not a single community library until 2020. That year, Jatin Lalit Singh, a young law student from the village of Bansa who was studying law in Delhi, came home during the pandemic and decided to build one. He is today the founder of the Aruna Mithilesh Foundation. His family and well-wishers thought it would not work. People do not read anymore, they said. And nobody takes something free seriously.
The Bansa Library opened in December 2020 and proved them wrong in ways nobody had anticipated. It now has over 6,000 members, issues 800 books a month, and never closes its doors. It runs on one slogan: library is for everybody, everybody is welcome.
A Village, a Law School, and a Lucky Detour
Jatin Lalit grew up in Bansa, a village in Hardoi district in Uttar Pradesh. Reading was not part of village life there, not reading for joy, not reading for pleasure. “Even when they will ask you to go read,” he recalls, “that was implying that go and study, go and write, do your homework, complete assignments.” The schools he attended were caught in a race to get students promoted from one class to the next, to get marks and move on.
He was, by his own admission, not a reader.
That changed when he reached law school in Delhi. Between classes and events, he stumbled upon a place called The Community Library Project. He started volunteering there, once a week, unpaid, mostly at least for those moments because it was a pretty space to photograph and share with friends on social media. “It was a voluntary position, nothing paid. I had to be there once a week and I thought it’s just a good place to pass time.”
But something shifted over three and a half years of doing read-alouds with children and watching them grow. He kept thinking of the children in Bansa. “While interacting with these children it used to take me to my village, that there are kids like them in my village as well.”
The plan, at that point, was modest and distant. He would become an advocate, earn well, and one day start something for his village. “That was a very charitable notion in my mind,” he says now.
Then COVID arrived.
The Pandemic That Became a Starting Point
In 2020, Jatin went back to Bansa. His friends, watching his social media updates from the library he had volunteered at, sent him a message: why not start something like this here? Schools were shut. The lockdown had no clear end. Young people who would normally migrate to cities for coaching and education had nowhere to go. These aspirants wanted resources in their own village so they would not have to leave.
“That was like the perfect time,” his friends told him.
Construction of the library began in September 2020. It was completed in December, and the library opened to the public. This was the first community library in the entire district, which has 19 blocks, 8 MLA seats, and 2 MPs. It is a large district in terms of both area and population.
The skeptics were not quiet. Well-wishers and family members warned him: nobody reads anymore, everyone is on their phones, and if you make it free, people will not take it seriously. Even Jatin, in a corner of his mind, held the same doubt. “Even if it works, good. It doesn’t work, it’s okay. This is not what I intend to do.”
The community responded with something no one had fully anticipated.
What 800 Books a Month Looks Like
Today, Bansa Library has over 6,000 members and a collection of over 9,000 books. It issues around 800 books a month, up from 30 or 40 when it started. Members span every age group: school children, aspirants preparing for competitive exams, adults above 55 or 60 who come simply to read newspapers and books. One of the library’s oldest members, in an interview on their YouTube channel, said that because they now have so many books to read, they do not even have time to think of what is happening in the world, and that this has helped them stay away from depression and hypertension.
Every month, 20 to 30 new people join.
In a conversation with The Logical Indian, Jatin pushed back firmly on the idea that people have stopped reading. “I have to disagree with this notion at all,” he said. “When there is a place, when there is a certain infrastructure, and when it is a welcoming space, when there is something for almost everyone, then people read.”
He pointed to digitalization not as a threat but as something that has pulled more people toward books. “A lot of people, including me, thought that reading is cool when I saw somebody clicking a picture and putting it on Instagram that I am reading this book.” Book discussion groups online, people talking about what they are reading, all of this has expanded the culture of reading rather than shrinking it.
He also pointed to what happens when a library becomes part of ordinary life from birth. A child born in 2020 or 2021 is now six years old and has always known a library. For that child, going to the library is as normal as going to school. “They don’t know that there is a library in other villages. What do people who don’t have a library do? Nothing of that sort.”
People from nearby villages are now asking Jatin and his team to open libraries in their villages too.
A Library That Never Closes
The library operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Librarians come in from 1 to 6 pm on weekdays, and from 9 am to 12 pm, then 1 to 6 pm on weekends, but the doors are never locked. During exam season, members study through the night. Some stay until 2 or 3 in the morning. A few have their own mattresses at the library. There is a small kitchen where they make tea and coffee.
To become a member, no fees are charged and no identity documents are required. Children under 8 must come with a parent or guardian, but anyone above 8 can simply walk in, give their name and village, and become a member. No one asks whether you read or not, or why you want to join.
The calendar is full. Dance classes, computer typing workshops, grammar sessions, book discussions, and movie days run through the week. Two Sundays every month, the library is reserved only for women. Around 150 women gather to talk and dance, with no fixed agenda. These are called women adda’s or baithaki. Thursdays are game days. Saturdays are for community walks, when librarians and volunteers go through the village, check in on members who have not been coming, and talk to children and other community members.
During the second COVID wave, the library was converted into an emergency health unit for the community. It is currently a workspace and head office for a self-help group of women. Young mothers can leave their children at the library crèche and attend to their own work. There is a skill and training center inside the library. There are workshops on menstrual hygiene. There is a dedicated civic learning center.
“I don’t decide what happens in the library,” Jatin explains. “The community is actually deciding what will go, what will happen in these libraries.” There is a library management committee, a student leadership council, and members from the community who shape what the space becomes.
The team also runs ongoing skill mapping initiatives, career progression programs, and is currently working on reimagining these libraries as livelihood launchpads.
One afternoon, a group of farmers walked in straight from the fields and asked Jatin to prove that the library is for everyone. What is here for us, they asked.
The team had no answer ready. But that question became a Kisan Corner, a tools library, a cooler with cold water, and a place to simply rest. It became, in short, something for them.
The Foundation Named After Two Women Who Never Went to School
After the initial response from the community, the library needed funding and formal programs. Everyone asking to support the work wanted a registered legal entity. In 2024, Jatin registered the Aruna Mithlesh Foundation to make that possible.
The name carries weight.
Aruna is his mother’s name. Mithlesh is his grandmother’s name. Both women lived their entire lives between the villages where they were born and where they were married. Neither had ever attended school or any formal education system. And yet, both understood enough about education to ensure Jatin had the best of whatever was available.
“This is not about just one Aruna, one Mithlesh in the village,” he told The Logical Indian. “From the district I come from, there are many Arunas, many Mithleshs, people who have not first-hand received the power that education brings but have realized the impact that it has. They want their kids and their children to have the best of it.”
The foundation now runs eight libraries, including Bansa Library. It plans to open at least five more every year. The organization will be CSR-eligible next year, which will help fund that expansion. At existing libraries, the team continues to assess who is not coming, whether the library is truly accessible to everyone, and what can be done better.
The co-founders of the library when it started were Abhishek, a friend from Ahmedabad who helped with planning and resources, and Malvika, his classmate from Law School. When the organization was formally registered, Niharika, then a student in Hansraj College DU, came on as a co-founder of the foundation. Srajal, Jatin’s sister, manages the on-ground operation of the Bansa Library.
The Word He No Longer Uses
Something else has changed since the early days, in how Jatin talks about the work itself.
“I don’t use the term charity anymore for the work that I do,” he says. “Because I do not consider it as a charity. It is a work like any other work.” Terms like “beneficiaries,” “deprived,” “marginalized,” “below poverty line” have no place in how he describes the people who use the library. “We believe people are people. It is the structure depicted by our own people in power, or by the system that we have in India, that some call below poverty line.”
He is also the Founder Member and director of the Free Libraries Network, a network of over 265 community libraries run by people who have started something from scratch, all operating on the same principle: everybody is welcome, and everybody has a right to read.
But Jatin is direct about what the existence of these libraries reveals. Speaking with The Logical Indian, he says: “We live in a democratic socialist country, and it is on the government that there must be doing all these things which we are doing, because what if I intend to not do this tomorrow? And I just say, sorry, I can’t do this. This is not my duty. The onus is not on me to do this.”
He pointed to the books visible on shelves in his own home as an example. “Hardly in my village, I don’t think there will be one single house that will have this kind of book shelf. Hardly two, three books, which the people have.” That disparity, he believes, is not a personal failure of families in his village. It is a structural failure. “Libraries are one such step, one such tool, if I may say, who have the potential and power to bridge this gap and to become a place of belonging to everybody.”
In a time of increasing division along lines of religion and caste, he sees the library as something rare. “I see the library as a place which becomes a place for everybody.”
What He Is Reading
Ask Jatin for a book recommendation and he turns to Hindi literature. Nirmal Verma and Vinod Kumar Shukla are authors he keeps returning to. He reads in phases, finishing all the books of one author before moving to the next.
For a read he genuinely enjoyed, he recommends Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag. “I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed it.”
But the book he thinks everyone must read is a book called Jamlo Chalti gayi (Jamlo kept walking) the story of a girl who returns from a city to her village during COVID, one of the migrant workers who walked home. “At that time, you and I might be making Dalgona coffee and one of those things, but she was the one who was just searching for a hand pump so that she can drink water, because no village was allowing these migrant workers in the fear that they might spread Corona.”
It is, in some ways, the same story the library in Bansa is trying to tell: that people are living entirely different realities in the same country, at the same moment. The library is one small bridge across that distance.
Jatin knows it. He also knows that one bridge, or eight, is not enough, and that it should not be left to individuals to build them alone.
The Logical Indian’s Perspective
In a country that leaves too much to individuals who care, Jatin Lalit Singh is one of the ones who showed up. The question he leaves behind, though, is not about him it is about who should have been there first.
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