Vani Jha
The public library at Pahari village, Haryana, has 13,000 books. It helped Vivek Singh get into IIT Dhanbad, where Tejashwini is preparing for JEE Main 2025.
For Nikita Yadav, who hails from Khetiawas in Haryana, the library at Government Senior Secondary School, Pahari, is six kilometers away. Yet, after sending her child to school daily, Yadav hops on her father-in-law’s motorcycle and goes to the library.
Government Senior Secondary School, Pahari, is the best government school where the library is at par. The IIT Delhi alumni set it up in 2019. This school library has air-conditioned rooms, separated sections for men and women, eight computers, two printers, 13,000 books, and wifi. The library has been an added boon for the Pahari village, where only 73% are literate, and 31.1 percent of women have been found literate as per the 2011 census.
For a person like Nikita Yadav, who is 28 and studying for the Haryana Teacher Eligibility Test, free-of-cost access to information that otherwise would have been too far or too pricey is the library’s advantage.
“We just became economically stable recently. So, I thought if I could work, I could support the family further,” said Yadav. “Now that my child is old enough to attend school, I can start looking for jobs. The library provides a quiet place away from the business of the home. Here, I can prepare and stick to a schedule.”.
It has already impacted the library. Almost 20 residents of the village who used it would get different jobs under the Haryana government. Some students who utilized the library even made it to IIT and NIT. It inspired the rest of the aspirants from Pahari and the surrounding villages.
IIT Delhi Alumni Innovation
The library was established through the efforts of the IIT Delhi Alumni Association, led by one of the village’s own, Vinod Kumar Yadav, an alumnus of the Government Senior Secondary, Pahari. He later went on to do his MSc and PhD from IIT Delhi.
He says he always wanted to run a library, and even before joining IIT Delhi, that was one of his dreams, but it is the institution that actually brought it to life.
“When studying in the village, I saw the difficulties. The family priorities were rearing buffaloes and meeting agriculture work, not education. Parents are also only focussing on government jobs. The major idea behind the library was for students to start thinking of getting into IITs, or IIMs,” said Yadav. He believes in the “importance of an enabling environment.”
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“If you give them that, they can blossom. Rural area students have the potential, but that is being neglected. If they see their neighbor study and become successful, there will be competition,” Yadav said.
“The implementing agency was the alumni association. Funding was mainly corporate CSR. IIT Delhi is a well-known institute, so people believe in the social arm. So, the proposal was taken pretty fast,” he said.
The library was funded in two phases. First, Rs 12 lakh was raised to construct the buildings, and later, ONGC donated Rs 18 lakh to complete the construction process. The library was inaugurated in 2019 by V Ramgopal Rao, then director of IIT Delhi.
The library even employs a librarian whom the gram panchayat initially paid. He is now covered by some other private company based out of Rewari.
Inspiring a village: Pahari Free Library
The free library close to your home has supported job aspirants in several ways by giving them books at home. Most of the 13,000 books the library has were donated by private companies, and they all revolved around recruitment and NTA NEET, NTA JEE Mains, and so on.
Pharmacy student Ritik Yadav, an SSC aspirant, does not need to travel for two hours to Rewari – the nearest town – to get the same facilities. He makes it daily from his village, Khalilpur, to Pahari, which is 3.4 km away. Rajbir Singh, whose son Vivek got into IIT Dhanbad this year, said the library helped them save time and money.
Such stories also motivate regular visitors to the library. Tejashwini, 18 years old, had taken a year off from college to prepare for JEE Main 2025. “Stories like that of Vivek Singh keep me motivated and on track,” she said.
Yadav was the main person behind the library setup and even received calls from the chief minister’s office to replicate the same library system in every government school in Haryana. In 2020, Haryana Deputy Chief Minister Dushyant Chautala said the state would set up libraries like this in every village so that village students do not have to go to cities to prepare for competitive exams.