The East Singhbhum district administration is going to set up as many as 30 libraries shortly for enhancing educational standards among students living in rural areas of the district.

The proposed libraries will have books donated by steel city residents.

With the intention of accumulating as many books as possible, the deputy commissioner Suraj Kumar has instructed the civic body, Jamshedpur Notified Area Committee's (JNAC) to start a campaign of old books collection and deposit them at the district development office.

For this noble cause, the deputy commissioner has roped in all the government departments not only for providing logistic support but also to ensure donation of as many old books as possible.

District Mineral Foundation Trust has been assigned to reconstruct or modify dilapidated government buildings for developing them into libraries.

The JNAC special officer, Krishna Kumar on Sunday made the civic body's city manager, Ravi Shankar Bharti nodal officer for the old books collection campaign.

"The kind of books that we intend to collect include old course books beginning from class I to class XII, books and periodicals meant for competitive exam preparation, story and poem books and reference books," said Bharti to The Telegraph Online.

The city manager said the libraries will be set up in 10 of 11 blocks of the district for which they will require a huge number of books.

"Hence we will have to mobilise support among the educated masses living in the city so as to come forward for this noble cause," the JNAC official said.

The district administration had recently launched a campaign for making people donate their used smart phones at various police stations so that it may offer them to the poor students for carrying out their online classes during the ongoing pandemic.