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For the past five months, Faiz Aquil Ahmed Mumtaz, district magistrate of Jamtara, Jharkhand has been renovating and refurbishing 118 dilapidated and deserted government buildings in as many panchayats and turning them into public libraries. He has already inaugurated 99 of them and will open the rest in the next 10 days.

"With the libraries, students don’t need to go to Patna or Delhi to prepare for competitive exams," says Faiz Ahmed. 

"Teachers can only guide you. You have to work very hard yourself. For this, you have to sit somewhere and spend 5-6 hours on books."  he adds. 

And in villages, houses are small and the families are big. Houses can't offer a creative and academic ambience for study. And libraries provide these. 

The literacy rate also will be considerably increased, he further adds. 

The initial plan was only  30 libraries in the current financial year but then they increased it into all 118 panchayats of the district as more and more requests came from different villages. 

The new libraries were basically old and dilapidated buildings that were left and had become an abode of snakes and insects. 

Faiz Ahmed hails from Bihar’s Muzaffarpur district and was schooled in Darjeeling district of West Bengal. He had cleared the UPSC exam with a rank of 17 in 2014 after enrolling at Jamia Millia Islamia’s Residential Coaching Academy and libraries has played a significant role in his success, says Faiz Ahmed.