Rekha Joshi was a schoolteacher in the hills of Uttarakhand, where many schools had textbooks but not a single storybook.
In 2013 she and her husband Anil sold their flat in Dehradun, bought a retired bus and filled it with 3,000 books in Hindi and English.
Reading as a habit
Pustak Yatra now runs 22 buses that visit 900 schools on a fixed fortnightly route, with trained storytellers and a simple borrowing system run by students themselves.
A child who falls in love with one book will find the next one on her own.
Schools on the route report better attendance on library days. “That is our favourite statistic,” Rekha laughs.
