Chennai: Three weeks back, Ashok Nagar branch library was a crowded venue with hundreds of civil-service aspirants and elderly citizens visiting it for their preparations and reading purposes.
On Wednesday, it wore a deserted look with over 1.5 lakh books dumped at the entrance with corporation staff cleaning up the venue. The official reading rooms of the city are limping back to normalcy after the recent deluge damaged over four lakh books kept on the ground floor of these buildings. The flooding not only caused monetary loss totalling Rs 5 crore, but has caused concern for regular users of the libraries.
Apart from these five at Ashok Nagar, CIT Nagar, Raghavendra colony, Puthu theruvu and Cochin illam on Mount Road, nearly 50,000 books have been destroyed in 17 other libraries in the city.
“Some of the civil service papers were not available even online when I checked. It is going to be a tough task ahead for me to prepare for my civil service exams,” said Navaneeth Kumar, an aspirant, who was a regular reader at Ashok Nagar library, which was one of the severely affected libraries where water rose to 6-7 feet, and destroyed nearly 1.5 lakh books.
According to estimates by Local Library Authority (LLA), 4.5 lakh books in the five branch libraries had been destroyed in the floods. Its not just the books, with computers, photocopying machines and furniture being washed away, the loss is likely to be a much higher figure, said a library official at the district central library at Teynampet.
LLA officials maintained that the overall figure of property loss would be estimated in a week. “We will be opening the periodicals sections of all the 22 libraries that are severely affected, in two days time. Also, we have ordered 7,000 new books for the Ashok Nagar branch library,” said Elango Chandrasekhar, District Library Officer, Chennai.
“Since we have extra copies of the books we have lost in three of the libraries, we are planning to get other books, mostly competitive exam books and journals, from donors,” he said.
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