By spreading libraries everywhere we can bridge the urban-rural divide
Rural public libraries will alleviate the digital divide between cities and villages to a great extent. It will help form an enlightened society by introducing a culture of knowledge gathering and sharing among the rural population
Bangladesh is a developing country with a huge number of populations living within its 1,48,460 square km of land area. According to the statistics from the Population and Housing Census 2022, around 60% of its population reside in rural areas. Compared to the urban population, people in rural areas are mostly deprived of quality education.
A large part of the rural population cannot afford three meals for their family members, let alone bear the educational expenses for their school-going children. Every year, a good number of rural youth drop out of school and engage in cheap manual labour to support their poverty-stricken families. Those who manage ways to carry on their education are deprived of the modern amenities needed to get proficiency in linguistics, science and mathematics.
In rural areas, very few educational institutions have a library with a well-trained librarian, and sufficient reading materials. Therefore, students have no credible outlet to understand the happenings of the concurrent world. Their knowledge gets restricted to the periphery of textbooks, guidebooks and lecture sheets prescribed by teachers and house tutors.
Keep updated, follow The Business Standard's Google news channel
Here comes the impetus for establishing public libraries in rural areas to spread lifelong teaching and learning initiatives among the rural youth, and make them information-literate conscious citizens of the state ready to take on the challenges of the 21st century and beyond.
Digital Bangladesh and Vision-41 will be ineffective if we cannot give our rural youth access to their right to access information superhighways and the universe of knowledge.
A public library is termed a people's university that ensures accessibility to the realm of knowledge for all classes of people.
As rural people spend their leisure hours gossiping or raising a storm over the trifling affairs of the day, a library set up at every village, stocked with sound reading and learning materials, can create a bridge between the masses and books.
Due to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, there was a massive setback in education as a result of the prolonged closure of educational institutions. This has derailed and detached the young generation from the mainstream ways of life. A major portion of youngsters spend their time playing video games, spending time on social media, etc, instead of paying proper attention to their assignments and homework.
Since all the educational programs were made available through online platforms, a good number of young people, who are mainly students of secondary and higher secondary echelons, had to buy mobile phones for the sake of attending online classes and other education-oriented purposes. The availability of 3G, 4G or high-speed broadband internet connectivity has, to some extent, opened up the horizon of a wonderful but bizarre world to rural youngsters.
The poverty-afflicted parents who could not afford mobile devices and other facilities for online classes stopped sending their children to school, because their daily income got pegged down during the pandemic. These students are now suffering from frustration and desperation.
This unfortunate state may imperil and mislead them to commit illegal and inconsiderate activities. This highlights the necessity of establishing a library to provide these youth with a better outlet.
Public libraries are the hub of educational transcendence and cultural orientation that stimulates a greater number of the population to participate in development activities, improve their quality of life and encourage their skills and competencies to become agents for change and form a knowledge-based society in the rural areas of Bangladesh.
With the help of books, non-books, journals, magazines, periodicals and ICT facilities housed in a well-organised library building, Bangladesh, which has a majority of young people, can open up new horizons for the underprivileged rural youth.
Libraries are social and cultural institutions that convert human labour into knowledge and skills that help people carry out their social obligations and responsibilities more effectively and precisely. Having an accessible source of knowledge and wisdom for a substantial portion of the young generation in rural areas will help engage them in constructive development activities.
They can gather knowledge about politics, economics, science, technology, and other academic disciplines, to present themselves as the nation's future leaders.
The younger generation can contribute further by spreading knowledge and information gained to other members of the rural community. In addition, rural libraries will play crucial roles in developing the decision-making and problem-solving modus operandi of the villagers and enable them to act according to the rules and regulations of the state as law-abiding citizens.
In 2021, on the occasion of Library day on 5 February, the incumbent Government promised to establish libraries in every nook and corner of the country, as per the motto - "library in every house is the pledge of the Mujib Year".
Now it is high time for the government to take far-reaching initiatives to establish a library in every village and foster human resources, and launch lifelong learning programs for people to face the challenges of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Digital Bangladesh and Vision-41 will be ineffective if we cannot give our rural youth access to their right to access information superhighways and the universe of knowledge.
Last but not least, rural public libraries will alleviate the digital divide between cities and villages to a great extent. It will help form an enlightened society by introducing a culture of knowledge gathering and sharing among the rural population.
Aktarul Islam is a Library and Information Science Professional, Researcher and Poet.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of The Business Standard.
