The starting point: can children read at all?

Any discussion of reading for pleasure in India has to sit alongside a harder problem, foundational reading. The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), a household survey run by the Pratham network across rural India since 2005, found that the share of Class 3 children in government schools able to read a Class 2-level text fell to 16.3 percent in 2022, after pandemic school closures, before recovering to 23.4 percent in 2024, the highest level recorded since the survey began. Even at this recovered level, fewer than a quarter of Class 3 children in government schools can read text pitched a single grade below their own. India’s 2009 entry into the OECD’s PISA rankings placed the country 72nd of 73 participating systems on reading, a result that contributed to India withdrawing from PISA for over a decade before a partial return through PISA for Development.

This context matters for a review of reading for pleasure, because it changes the question. In England, the concern documented by the National Literacy Trust is that children who can read are choosing not to, with reading enjoyment among 8- to 18-year-olds at its lowest recorded level in 2024. In much of India, particularly in government schools in the states with weaker outcomes, a meaningful share of children have not yet crossed the threshold where reading for pleasure is even an available choice. A school library serving such a population is doing double duty: supporting basic reading acquisition and, only once that is underway, cultivating the habit of reading by choice that Pain-Lewins wrote about.

School library provision: patchy, undercounted, and skewed by school type

Where UK campaigners had access to a national survey of 1,750 schools, Indian school library provision has to be pieced together from smaller, older, and more localised studies. A survey of government primary schools in Bangalore found that 85 percent had some kind of library space, but only 6 percent had an actual librarian; in practice, most of what counted as a library was a shelf of books kept in a classroom or office, difficult for children to access on their own. A 1998 survey by the Indian Library Association’s school library committee found that most government primary schools in Delhi had no library at all, and that secondary school libraries, where they existed, fell well below acceptable standards. A later study of 201 senior secondary schools across ten districts of Jammu and Kashmir reported much the same pattern: understaffing, poor physical facilities, and disorganised, inadequate collections, with no consistent standards governing how a school library should be run.

More recent, larger-scale figures suggest the picture has not resolved itself. ASER 2022 found that only about a third of surveyed government schools had any form of library, and NCERT’s 2017 National Achievement Survey found a wide gap in provision between high- and low-performing states, with a functional library present in 91 percent of schools in the ten highest-achieving states compared with 62 percent in the ten lowest-achieving ones, which included Arunachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and Punjab. The same survey found that schools with a functional library reported better learning outcomes, echoing the correlational evidence that has driven UK library advocacy, though as with the UK data this does not by itself establish that the library caused the improvement rather than simply being one marker of a better-resourced school.

Government and low-fee private schools fare worse than better-funded private and international schools, a pattern that tracks the broader private-versus-government divide in Indian school outcomes rather than reversing it. The central government’s response has mainly taken the form of funding, not staffing: the Samagra Shiksha scheme provides an annual library grant to government schools ranging from roughly 5,000 to 20,000 rupees, covering primary through senior secondary level, intended for book purchases rather than for hiring qualified library staff. This design mirrors a problem visible in the UK data, too, where funding for stock without funding for a trained person to manage and promote it limits what a library grant can achieve, but the Indian version of the problem is sharper because so few schools have any dedicated library staff to begin with.

What the evidence says about impact: a genuine tension

Unlike the UK evidence base, which is built mainly from large surveys and qualitative practice research, two of the strongest India-specific studies on school libraries are outcome evaluations with a comparison group, and they do not agree.

A randomised evaluation of the Akshara Foundation’s library programme in Bangalore, covering 386 government primary schools and over 20,000 students between 2007 and 2009, found close to zero effect. Schools that received a staffed library, or access to a mobile librarian, showed no meaningful improvement in language test scores 16 months later compared with schools that did not, and no effect on maths, science, or attendance either. The researchers’ own explanation was dosage: even in schools with a library, the average child visited only 2.4 times a month and borrowed 1.3 books, a level of exposure the study’s authors judged too low, compared with interventions that see children engaging with a resource several times a week, to move a test score.

Room to Read’s own outcome evaluation of a library intervention in Karnataka, by contrast, found statistically significant gains in what the organisation calls children’s habit of reading, a composite measure covering book borrowing, reading for enjoyment, and reading confidence, and reported reading skill gains roughly three times greater among children in its literacy programme schools compared with matched comparison schools. The programme differs from the Akshara model mainly in intensity and design: Room to Read pairs library access with teacher training, curated levelled reading material, and a formally mandated library period built into the school timetable, rather than relying on children to opt into occasional voluntary library visits.

Read together, these two evaluations echo, in a starker form, the tension Cremin and Scholes describe in the international literature: providing books and shelf space is not sufficient on its own, and the design and intensity of how children are actually brought into contact with a library, not just whether one physically exists, appears to be what separates programmes that move outcomes from ones that do not.

The language problem: reading material in a multilingual country

A concern Pain-Lewins raised about UK collections failing to reflect a multicultural pupil population has a distinct and in some ways more acute counterpart in India, where the underlying issue is not just representation within an English-language collection but the sheer scarcity of children’s books in most of the country’s languages at all. India has 22 scheduled languages and hundreds of other mother tongues, yet children’s publishing has historically concentrated on English and Hindi, driven by market economics rather than by where children actually live and study.

The most substantial response to this gap has come from outside government, through the non-profit publisher Pratham Books and its open-licence digital platform StoryWeaver, which has grown since its 2015 launch from around 800 storybooks in 24 languages to tens of thousands of openly licensed titles in several hundred languages, including minority and tribal languages such as Gondi, Kolami, and Korku that receive little to no commercial publishing attention. Because the content is openly licensed, teachers and librarians can translate, adapt, or print titles locally, which matters in schools without reliable internet access. NEP 2020 explicitly commits to developing books in local and Indian languages through the National Book Trust, though the scale of what commercial and government publishing has actually delivered on that commitment lags well behind what a platform like StoryWeaver has achieved through open licensing.

Policy on paper: NEP 2020 and its gap with practice

NEP 2020 gives school libraries more explicit policy attention than any previous Indian education policy, calling for reading corners and library access in every school, digital library infrastructure, a National Book Promotion Policy, and expected professional development hours for librarians. Government reading campaigns launched under its banner, including the Padhe Bharat Andolan and its associated hundred-day reading push, have tried to build a reading culture from Anganwadi centres up to Class 8 rather than waiting for children to reach secondary school. NIPUN Bharat, the associated foundational literacy mission, has been credited by ASER’s own director with contributing to the reading recovery seen between 2022 and 2024, particularly in government schools.

The gap between this policy language and what a school librarian, in Pain-Lewins’s sense of wise selection and dialogue with pupils, is actually equipped to do remains wide. NEP 2020 sets expectations for what a library should be; it does not, on its own, solve the staffing shortfall that the Bangalore, Delhi, and Jammu and Kashmir studies all independently identify as the more basic constraint. A library grant that buys books but not a librarian’s time addresses only half of what Pain-Lewins argued a school library needs to promote reading well.

Conclusion

Pain-Lewins’s central claim, that a school library’s contribution to reading for pleasure depends on adequate staffing, a well-chosen and relevant collection, and a real relationship between librarian and reader, applies to India, but the Indian evidence adds two things the UK-focused literature does not have to reckon with in the same way. First, reading for pleasure in India cannot be separated from the unresolved question of basic reading fluency, which a meaningful share of children in government schools still have not reached even after the post-pandemic recovery captured in ASER 2024. Second, the two most rigorous India-specific evaluations of library provision disagree with each other in a way that points to intensity and design, not mere physical presence, as the deciding factor, a more pointed version of the tensions that Cremin and Scholes describe in the wider international evidence. Multilingual, open-licence publishing initiatives such as StoryWeaver, largely built outside the school system by an NGO rather than by government or commercial publishers, currently do more to solve the language-access side of the problem than either state library grants or national policy commitments have so far managed on their own. Whether NEP 2020’s ambitions for libraries close that gap will depend on whether staffing, not just book funding, becomes the priority.