Supreme Court gives the Centre three weeks to show space for the Central Secretariat Library's 8.5 lakh books

The Supreme Court on Monday gave the Union government three weeks to file a detailed account of where the Central Secretariat Library will go when Shastri Bhawan is demolished. Justices Sanjay Kumar and Sanjeev Sachdeva want the area, the layout, and a clear answer on whether the new rooms can hold 8.5 lakh books plus about two lakh more that are already in cartons in RK Puram.

The library was set up in 1891. It has sat in Shastri Bhawan since 1969, on four floors covering about 5,500 square metres. The collection includes rare books, official records and gazetteers. Under the Central Vista plan, Shastri Bhawan is marked for demolition. A library of that size cannot be packed into a corridor and unpacked later without a decision on floor area.

Earlier this year the housing ministry offered two rooms at Kartavya Bhavan-2, together about 300 square metres. The Ministry of Culture, which runs the library, said that space could not take the collection. Three hundred square metres is about 5 percent of the present floor area. Even a dense stack does not close a gap of that size. The court was told on Monday that around two lakh books have sat packed in cartons in RK Puram since 2011, unopened.

Additional Solicitor General Aishwarya Bhati told the bench that a larger library, spread over two floors, was being planned, and that the proposed area would be bigger than the space the library uses now. She did not, in the account of the hearing given by reporters in court, put a square-metre figure on that plan. The affidavit due in three weeks is supposed to supply the number and the drawings.

The bench has appointed senior advocate Hari Priya Padmanabhan to assist it. The next hearing is on 16 November. The case reached the court after a media report questioned the relocation. On 1 October the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs rejected reports that no space had been marked for the library. Monday's order does not contradict that denial. It asks for the plan on paper, with dimensions.

The practical question is not whether a room exists. It is whether the room can take the books that are already on shelves and the books that have been in boxes for fifteen years. An 8.5 lakh collection on 5,500 square metres works out to about 155 volumes a square metre, before reading rooms, staff desks and the gazetteer runs. A two-floor plan that is only marginally larger than the present one can work. A plan that counts the 300 square metres already rejected cannot.

The cartons in RK Puram are a separate problem. Books left packed since 2011 are not in the public catalogue in any usable sense. If the new building is sized only for the Shastri Bhawan shelves, the RK Puram stock stays in boxes. The court's question joins the two holdings. The affidavit has to say whether both fit.

Central Vista has moved ministries into new bhavans on a published timetable. A library is slower. Shelving, climate, and the weight of paper stacks are not the same job as shifting a secretariat desk. The Culture ministry's refusal of the 300 square metre offer is the only on-record objection so far. Bhati's statement that a larger two-floor space is planned is the government's current answer. The square metres will decide which of those two statements describes the building that actually gets built.

Readers who use the library have no new access date. The court has not stayed the demolition of Shastri Bhawan. It has asked for a plan before 16 November. Until that affidavit is filed, the known facts are the 1891 founding, the 1969 move, the 5,500 square metres now in use, the 300 square metres offered and refused, the two lakh volumes in RK Puram since 2011, and a three-week clock.