The library is the best classroom we keep ignoring

Ask the toppers of any competitive exam where they studied and a pattern appears: a corner seat in a public reading room, held for months. The library is quietly the city's most productive square footage.

Yet reading rooms run on goodwill — donated newspapers, one caretaker, furniture from another decade. We fund flyovers by the kilometre and libraries by the apology.

The fix is not grand: reliable hours, working fans and lights, drinking water, and enough seats that a student does not queue at dawn to study at noon. Every one of these is a solved problem waiting for a budget line.

A city that gives its students a quiet chair is investing in the cheapest infrastructure it will ever build. The returns walk out of that room every year, results in hand.