From Swati Dayal
Greater Noida, Aug 31 (KNN)  Prisoners at Dasna Jail in Ghaziabad district now spend their time more productively owing to the 4,000 volume automated library set up there by BIMTECH.

“The Dasna jail library project was a social initiative taken by the students of Birla Institute of Management Technology (BIMTECH), who formed the Ranganathan society for Social Welfare and Library Development funded by the institute,” said Director of BIMTECH, H Chaturvedi.

The library operating since March this year helps prison inmates upgrade their skills and knowledge through the fully automated library.

The idea of the library was incubated during a four-month joint effort by the jail superintendent of Dasna jail, Vrijesh Sharma, BIMTECH students and the librarian at the institute Rishi Tiwari.

Significantly, under the Uttar Pradesh State Government policy, all state jails have a mandate to build a library.  However, Dasna jail had a very limited choice of books which failed to interest the prisoners.

Since 2009, around 25 students of BIMTECH who in addition to their regular curriculum wanted to get involved in social activities and so became members of the Ranganathan Society.  As a part of the society, this group visits nearby villages, helping residents set up libraries in these areas.

These students took up the jail library proposal as a challenge and executed their ideas with utmost effort.  The project was hailed by the jailed authorities as well as the inmates that comprise of lawyers, doctors, software engineers and even a few management graduates.

However, in order to create a well-balanced library for the jail inmates, students needed to understand the lifestyle of the prisoners, their background and reading interests. For this, they called upon the HR philosophies that they had learnt in their classes at that point of time.

They then created a questionnaire that helped them understand the prisoners’ demands from the library in a better manner.

The student’s method proved successful as the results of the survey clearly showed that the reading choices of the inmates were specific down to the author and even the titles of the books that they would like to read.

Some prisoners even preferred religious and current affairs books, their choices ranging from Hindi literature to law and even management books.

So when it came to setting up a fully automated, computerised library, the students first requested their peers, alumni and other contacts to donate books. The gaps in the compiled list were filled with the help of funds allocated by the institute. Students also made am index of all the books, marking the books with the Dasna Jail stamp and numbering them alphabetically. The institute also donated a couple of computers to the jail, which were then upgraded with the latest library software.

Students then uploaded all the books on to the system and even trained four inmates who had been nominated to take charge of the library functions to operate the computers and keep the library up-to-date in terms of records.  (KNN/SD)