The mobile Braille library (Delhi)

More than an hour after they started from the headquarters of Delhi Public Library (DPL) opposite the Old Delhi railway station, Devinder Kumar ( and team make their stop at the All India Confederation of the Blind (AICB) at Rohini Sector 5, more than 30 kilometres from the city. Once their van has been positioned near the gate, Kumar goes in to tell students that the DPL’s mobile Braille Library is open for business.

This is the first trip of the mobile Braille Library to the AICB after the service reopened after summer vacations. “We make two to three stops a day, mostly at schools for one hour at each. We carry mostly fiction, as textbooks are available at respective school libraries,” Kumar says.

Arranged in shelves inside the yellow van, where Kumar and an attendant issue books, are about 1,500 books, mostly Hindi fiction and a few English volumes of Shakespeare and Dickens.

“Almost all of our clients issue Hindi fiction, so we stock mostly that,” says Romila Ahluwalia, the Braille library in-charge at DPL who had accompanied the Braille library van on Friday.

Sheila Yadav, attending a stenography course at the AICB, says, “I prefer fiction. Mostly Prem Chand and Shrilal Shukla. Mobile library is more convenient than going to Lodhi Road. The Metro runs only till Pragati Maidan and the rest of the journey is by bus.”

Prakash Chandra, another student, prefers general knowledge books. “The collection on the mobile library is good, but I wish they had more magazines,” he says.

Every Thursday the van heads to the Braille library at Lodhi Road to change its collection. The library is now working to add e-books, which can be issued in CDs or on pen drives, says the Braille library in-charge.

“The mobile library was begun in 1980 after it was noticed that very few students from outside Central Delhi visited Braille Library at Lodhi Road. But the service shut down in 2000 after the diesel vehicle had to be replaced. It was reopened in 2005 and now we add about five-six members everyday,” says Ahluwalia.

The books of the mobile library are bought from two Braille presses that currently function in Delhi — one at the AICB and another at the National Federation of the Blind — as well as institutions like the National Institute for the Visually Handicapped (NIVH) in Dehradun.

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