Kolkata Centre for Creativity hosts Book Handover ceremony to ​commemorate Global Media and Information Literacy Week

Information literacy is extremely crucial for today's learners as it fosters problem-solving and reasoning skills. It helps them evaluate and ask more questions along with finding different ways to seek answers, form opinions, and thereafter take decisions to become successful learners and responsible citizens. Information Literacy week is celebrated from 24 to 31 October every year.

This year, the Kolkata Centre for Creativity and The Royal Thai Consulate-General jointly hosted the Book Handover ceremony at The Library Area of KCC on 29 October, 2022. The event commemorated ‘Global Media and Information Literacy Week’ and was graced by Ms. Richa Agarwal, Chairperson, KCC; Ms. Reena Dewan, Director, KCC; Ms. Acharapan Yavaprapas, Consul-General of Thailand; and other distinguished guests.

The Global Media and Information Literacy Week celebrates the progress achieved towards 'Media and Information Literacy for All'. The Global MIL Week 2022 focuses on trust and solidarity as it relates to people, media, digital platforms, governments, private sector, and non-governmental organisations. Media and Information Literacy (MIL) as a collection of different and intersecting competencies can help to build bridges between learning inside and outside the classroom. The demand for these competencies is steadily rising across the globe through the internet but the importance of libraries and physical book reading are essential and this event aims to encourage people to know diverse cultures of different countries through the reading of books.

“This donation of books from The Royal Thai Consulate-General to our Library is a major step in encouraging the exchange of cultural values and learning which will be of immense help to avid book lovers in the city and will aid in the mitigation of difficulties arising out of and associated with misinformation and a lack of information”, says Ms Richa Agarwal, Chairperson, Kolkata Centre for Creativity.

The Telegraph Online Edugraph got into a candid conversation with Ms Richa Agarwal on the occasion to know more about how the ceremony will make a difference in the long run to which she added, “There has to be a starting point to everything and in the longer run I definitely believe that such events would tend to be fruitful for children from all backgrounds and belonging to every nook and corner of the country”

Literacy is an effective tool against poverty. If every child in developing countries like India aims to achieve the basic reading skills, millions of people could be lifted out of extreme poverty. Learning is always a lifelong journey. The more one learns, the better they are able to adapt to a rapidly changing world. The more one adapts, the better they have the ability to continuously improve their standard of living to live a healthier and a better life.

Throwing light on the same Ms Richa Agarwal added “I strongly believe reading is something which comes out of force of habit, children today have to want to read more to be able to read, unfortunately today the children today are exposed to the digital arena which itself is so capturing where one does not have to apply their mind so people today get drawn towards the digital world. Our neighbouring country China has passed a rule that children today cannot play video games more than a certain hours in a day because of the amount of exposure they had towards the digital media. I have two children and when they were younger I used to read to them and hence today they have automatically got into a habit of reading. I think it's a habit which needs to be developed, children need to be nurtured in a way that they make up their minds to read for 5 to 10 minutes in a day to get into that long term thing”.

The contemporary era of the 21st century is often termed as the information age owing to the vast amount of information sources available to the target audiences. Information literacy totally equips learners with critical skills which assists them to learn independently throughout their lives.