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Among the most frequently unasked questions today is why we think there’s no need for libraries any more. The answer, if one bothered to ask the question, would be a breezy dismissal: “Nobody reads books anymore.” Or, “There’s Google, right?” That would be an unsatisfactory response, in fact a very incongruous one.

We live in the most information-thirsty times ever, and we can’t seem to walk four paces without consulting a search engine. Everyone has a smart phone and all information one could ever need is accessible at our fingertips.

However, we are vastly constrained by the vanishing of spaces where we might consume that information and contemplate on it. Work spaces are cramped and educational institutions now have corridors but no cloisters. Space is such a premium in modern apartments that a study is a luxury.

Given all that, it is common to see students studying in parks, and morning walkers stopping to read a newspaper at a roadside tea vend. In some localities where out-of-towner students and workers live in hostels, reading rooms are cropping up, where one pays by the hour to study in peace. Who says there’s no need for libraries? Heck, couples are conducting their romances in parks.

Such has been our amnesia on libraries that we have no proper record of how many there were in existence and how many have been lost. The Raja Ram Mohun Roy National Library Foundation set up by the Union Ministry of Culture keeps only a record of public libraries, of which there were 46,746 at last count.

Surprisingly, Kerala does not top the table, having only 8,415 public libraries. Maharashtra has that honour, with 12,191. But the horror of horrors is how many states in our union make do with so few public libraries. Where ideally every locality should have one, there are 573 libraries in all of UP and a grand total of 192 in Bihar.

There are a whole clutch of states in the double digits, with Madhya Pradesh having a piteous 42. Little Pondicherry (81) does better than Punjab (15). One reason for this sparse distribution in the northern states is that they were late to pass legislations establishing public libraries. Tamil Nadu and Karnataka passed their library legislations in 1948 and 1965, respectively, while UP and Rajasthan didn’t have one until 2006 and Bihar until 2008.

These are all states with low internet penetration; therefore no case can be made that libraries are being replaced by the internet. The loss of libraries must count as our great failure to realise that they are opportunities, not costs.

Apart from being repositories of knowledge, they can serve as study areas for youngsters who do not have such spaces at home or cannot afford connectivity. Given that the pandemic widened the knowledge gap between the haves and have-nots, libraries could bridge that chasm.

This loss of this opportunity stems from our failure to reimagine libraries in the 21st century. Libraries are not just a stack of books. It’s where a community can gather to make sense of its chaos.

It’s where the youth can sit down to orient themselves to the future, where ideas could be exchanged. We need to reimagine the library as a 360 degree cultural space: for books, as a cafe, a film club, an activity centre, an indoor sports facility, a multiple hobby hub, and yes, even a space to fraternise and socialise, all rolled into one