Voracious readers in India are turning to a centuries-old private lending system as public libraries fall short.
Akanksha SinghAugust 13, 2026 at 10:00 PM EDT
The shelves at Victoria Circulating Library and Music House leave little room for snobbery. Mills & Boon romances are wedged beside literary classics. Political biographies sit atop Tintincomics. Towering stacks of dog-eared thrillers line narrow aisles, alongside DVDs, CDs and Hindi bestsellers piled Tetris-style in triple and quadruple layers.
Despite the apparent chaos, owner Arif Merchant knows where everything is. He’s spent four decades serving customers in the Mumbai neighborhood of Mahim, building a vast inventory around local tastes.
“The personal touch is still here,’’ he says, gently maneuvering piles of books that crowd his counter.
In a country where access to public libraries can be difficult, cluttered stores like Victoria play an important role. Known as circulating libraries, these privately run businesses typically charge a modest monthly subscription and a fee for each book borrowed, offering everything from pulp fiction to local-language novels and comic books. The model, which goes back centuries to the time before governments set up libraries for lending books, has found a second life today to meet residents’ voracious appetite for reading.
With 46,746 public libraries, India has one of the largest networks in the world, according to the most recent data. Yet those figures mask significant shortcomings. Small reading rooms containing few books are counted alongside full-scale libraries, making the data an unreliable measure of access, according to Preedip Balaji, a researcher at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements in Bengaluru.
Amid a patchwork of federal, state and local government policies, funding varies widely across the country. Seventeen of India’s 36 states and union territories haven’t passed legislation for the funding of public libraries, and many face budget and staffing shortfalls and struggle to meet community needs, Balaji says.
“We’re a vast country with a large population and regional diversity,” he says. “Libraries are third spaces that could bring everybody to the table regardless of where they are from or their family backgrounds.”
Bureaucracy can also be a formidable barrier. Rather than functioning as open community spaces, many public libraries require an applicant to provide a passport photograph, proof of address, and forms signed and stamped by their school or employer before they can obtain a borrowing card.
Merchant’s system, by comparison, is simple. He has about 150 customers a month and records each name in a thick notebook. They pay a refundable deposit of 300 rupees ($3.15) and a rental fee up to 20% of the book’s retail price. He continually updates his collection in response to readers’ tastes, whether that means stocking niche manga titles or the latest Geronimo Stiltonbooks.The front of Victoria Circulating Library and Music House in Mumbai.Photographer: Akanksha Singh/Bloomberg
Mahim resident Bernard Andrade has been a regular at Victoria for more than 30 years and says its range is what keeps him coming back. “You have serious nonfiction books, old classics, literary stuff in regional languages, primarily Hindi and Marathi,” he says. “Plus films and magazines.”
The Ministry of Culture is trying to modernize India’s public libraries through financial support, staff training, digital infrastructure and policy advice for states. But more needs to be done, according to the Free Libraries Network, which advocates for free, equal access to reading, learning and information resources. The group says only a small percentage of India’s population of more than 1.4 billion people has easy access to libraries, with socioeconomic barriers such as caste and class continuing to limit participation. It’s calling for universal library access to help improve literacy and numeracy. India’s literacy rate stands at 81.7%, below Sri Lanka’s 92.7% and the global average of 87.7%, according to World Population Review.
“There has been little thought about what children miss when they don’t have access to books,” says Jatin Lalit, director of the Free Libraries Network. “There are sections of society that fall out of the schooling system and the college system — where do they go? Community and public libraries are meant to be that space for everybody.”
The Ministry of Culture didn’t respond to emailed requests for commentArif Merchant, owner of Victoria Circulating Library and Music House, updates his stock according to his clientele’s taste.Photographer: Akanksha Singh/Bloomberg
Rather than waiting for the government to act, Lalit opened a free community-run library in his village of Bansa in rural Uttar Pradesh in 2024. Today, it houses about 4,500 books, provides Wi-Fi and computers, serves 4,500 members and reaches another 54 villages through a mobile library.
Indians are voracious readers, spending on average 352 hours a year on the activity, according to World Population Review data. That’s second only to the US, which averages 357 hours.
In a country marked by unequal access to public libraries, circulating libraries like Victoria are helping feed that appetite and plugging the gap in social infrastructure, according to Balaji.Shelves at Victoria are stocked with everything from classic reads to genre fiction.Photographer: Akanksha Singh/Bloomberg
Circulating libraries flourished in Britain for about 100 years from the mid-18th century and played a key role in helping to develop a popular reading culture, according to the Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature. Jane Austen herself was a subscriber and mentions them in her letters and novels, including Pride and Prejudice.
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The earliest Indian example dates to 1709, when an Anglican mission sent out a circulating library to Calcutta, with several more opening in the decades that followed. Today, while the UK has mostly phased them out in favor of free public libraries, most major Indian cities still have such privately run book rental enterprises, including Eloor Libraries, which first opened in 1979 and has three branches.
While street-front stores like Merchant’s feel almost untouched by time, other enterprises — like Easwari Lending Library in Chennai and Choose & Read in Coimbatore — have introduced online ordering and doorstep delivery. The industry was hurt by reduced footfall during the Covid-19 pandemic and still faces challenges, including rents rising faster than membership fees and digital entertainment reducing recreational reading.
Nevertheless, Merchant says he’s noticed an uptick in business post-pandemic, particularly among young people.
“Parents are introducing their children to books,” he says. “If people are taking home books, I’m happy. What else is there?”
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