Excelsior Correspondent
JAMMU, June 26: Several rare books, the second edition or duplicate copies of which are unavailable in the market, have gone missing from the historic Sri Ranbir Singh Library, an RTI query has revealed.
The response to the application filed by activist Raman Sharma also said that five rare books go missing from the library every week.
The reply received from the Deputy Director Library revealed that in the past 10 years more than 2,400 books have been damaged in the library.
327 rare books borrowed by members of the library, in the same period, have not been returned, the response said.
Replying to another question on whether any action was taken against the defaulter, the officer informed that no action has been taken against any such member and their membership has not been suspended or cancelled either.
“The books swindled by the members include very rare books on different subjects including law, spirituality, religion, academics, history, health, politics, culture and art written by local, national and international authors like George Morrow, Khushwant Singh, Jawaharlal Nehru and Prof Bhim Singh,” the reply said.
The missing books are in Dogri, Urdu and Hindi languages, out of which many are based on the religious history of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh regions.
Though the estimated cost of these 327 books as told by the department is Rs 70,510 but in fact many books still in the possession of defaulters are priceless as there are some books whose other copy or edition is not available in the market.
According to the rules of the SRS library, a member has to return a borrowed book within 14 days but the list of defaulters shows that some of them borrowed in February 2005 have not been returned till date.
The department has informed that the library has a stock of 57,341 books as on date and in the year 2014-15, the library did not receive any book whereas the total expenditure during the last 10 years on purchasing books is Rs 53,63,541.
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