Editorial | National Digital Library need of the hour | Budget 2023

A National Digital Library for children and adolescents will be set up for facilitating the availability of quality books across geographies, languages, genres and levels and device-agnostic accessibility. States will be encouraged to set up physical libraries for them at panchayat and ward levels and provide infrastructure for accessing the national digital library resources.

The move to set up a National Digital Library comes as the government has increased its push to digitise education in a bid to increase access for children and teens across the country. For instance, the PM e-Vidya scheme, launched in 2020, aims to unify all efforts related to digital/online/on-air education to enable multi-mode access to education. This will benefit nearly 25 crore school-going children across the country.

Library is not just a mere collection of books but a knowledge bank to transform life and society. Digital library is not confined to a particular location or so called building; it is virtually distributed all over the world.