The Central Secretariat Library: Beyond Shelves and Buildings

A detailed report published in The Indian Express recently on the uncertain future of the Central Secretariat Library amid the ongoing redevelopment of New Delhi's administrative complex quickly gained traction on social media, sparking concern among scholars, readers, and former users of the institution. Taking that moment as a point of reflection, Krishan Gopal Sharma looks beyond the immediate controversy to ask a deeper question: how should a modern state preserve its institutional memory while pursuing ambitious projects of renewal and modernization? His essay argues that libraries are not merely repositories of books but living archives of a society's intellectual and administrative continuity, deserving not just preservation, but a thoughtful place in the future.

The Central Secretariat Library: Beyond Shelves and Buildings

Krishan Gopal Sharma

What Happens When a Library Has No Room in the Future?

A library rarely makes headlines when it is functioning normally. It sits quietly behind doors, collecting books, reports, documents and memories while generations pass through its reading rooms. There is nothing spectacular about it. No ribbon-cutting every morning, no flashing lights, no applause. Its importance reveals itself slowly — perhaps when a researcher finds a forgotten government report, when an official needs a document from another era, or when a student discovers a book that changes the direction of an enquiry.

That quietness can also make libraries vulnerable. When buildings are redesigned and priorities rearranged, a library can begin to look like little more than floor space occupied by shelves.

The Central Secretariat Library (CSL) in New Delhi presents precisely such a moment of reflection.

The institution dates back to 1891, when the Imperial Secretariat Library was established in Calcutta. It moved to Delhi with the transfer of the capital and eventually became the Central Secretariat Library in 1948. Since 1969, it has been housed in the G-Wing of Shastri Bhawan. Its collection today is about 8.5 lakh printed and non-printed documents, making it the second-largest Central Government library after the National Library, Kolkata, according to the library itself.

Now Shastri Bhawan is itself part of the transformation of Delhi's Central Vista. Recent reporting says the building is among those being replaced as the new central secretariat takes shape. But the future of the CSL has remained uncertain, raising a question larger than where its shelves will eventually stand: when a state modernises its physical infrastructure, what happens to the institutional memory housed inside it?

When a Library Begins to Disappear

Imagine the day the shelves begin to empty. A book that has stood there for decades is lifted for perhaps the last time. A catalogue drawer closes. A reading table loses its familiar pile of papers. A librarian has to decide what goes first and what can wait.

Nothing dramatic happens.

There are no flames, no wrecking ball, no moment worthy of a television headline. And yet a form of disappearance may already have begun. This is how institutional memory can sometimes be lost — not through destruction, but through displacement.

For people who have worked in or regularly used a library, the building is rarely just a building. It becomes part of a mental map: the corridor, the reading room, the particular shelf, the familiar desk, the quiet sound of pages turning. Human beings do not respond only to destruction. We respond to displacement because displacement breaks continuity.

The books may survive. The catalogue may survive. The institution may survive. But the place in which generations encountered that knowledge may not.

These differences are important to keep in mind.

A Library Is More Than Its Books

The CSL's own history makes clear that it is more than a large collection of books. Its holdings are an accumulation of several earlier institutions and include government reports, gazettes, Indian and foreign official documents and other reference material. The Ministry of Culture describes its primary role as serving the information needs of ministries and departments of the Government of India, while also making its facilities available to scholars, academicians, students and other non-official users.

That makes the library part of the machinery through which a government remembers.

Governments change. Ministers change. Policies change. Administrative priorities change. But the documentary record allows the state — and those outside it — to ask what happened before, why a decision was taken, what an earlier government reported and how an issue evolved over time.

In that sense, a library is not simply a warehouse of knowledge. It is an institutional memory system.

And institutional memory has a peculiar quality: its value often becomes visible only when it is needed.

The Numbers Tell Their Own Story

Eight-and-a-half lakh documents are difficult to visualise.

The number is so large that it risks becoming abstract. Yet every volume represents something — a report, an argument, an observation, a piece of legislation, a statistical record, an official publication, a scholarly work or perhaps an obscure document that suddenly becomes important decades later.

The library's history itself is a reminder of this accumulation. The present collection contains resources inherited from several older institutions. The official history records, among other things, the merger of the UNESCO Library and the Scientific Research and Cultural Affairs Library into the CSL in the early years after Independence.

This is how institutional memory grows. Not in one grand act, but through layers. One generation adds something. Another preserves it. A third discovers a use for it that its predecessors could not have anticipated.

To dismantle that continuity casually would therefore be different from simply moving office furniture.

The Strange Irony of a Knowledge State

There is an interesting irony here.

India is investing heavily in digital infrastructure, artificial intelligence, knowledge platforms, digitisation and technology-enabled governance. The language of the modern state increasingly revolves around data, accessibility and information.

That makes the preservation of physical knowledge institutions no less important — perhaps more so. A modern knowledge society should not have to choose between the physical book and the digital file. It should be capable of preserving both.

The CSL itself has moved in that direction. Its catalogue is available electronically, and its official material records continuing efforts towards digital repositories and knowledge resources. A 2026 CSL publication describes the institution's collection as including books, reports and government publications and highlights its digital-repository work.

But digitisation cannot answer every question. A digital scan can preserve content. It cannot automatically preserve provenance, physical context, arrangement, institutional continuity or the experience of encountering a body of knowledge as a coherent collection. Nor can a database reproduce the quiet serendipity of finding something that nobody was looking for.

Sometimes the most valuable discovery in a library begins with a wrong shelf.

The False Comfort of Digitisation

There is a temptation in the digital age to believe that once something has been scanned, the physical institution no longer matters.

It does.

Archives and libraries are not merely containers of information. They are systems of classification, preservation, authentication and access. Their physical environments are designed around those functions.

A rare document requires appropriate conservation. A fragile volume requires careful handling. Large collections require proper storage, climate control, cataloguing and retrieval systems. Researchers need reading spaces. Librarians need working areas. Digitisation itself requires equipment, expertise, metadata and long-term preservation strategies.

A modern library therefore need not be old-fashioned. Quite the opposite. The right response to a historic library may be to build it a better home. That is the crucial distinction between modernisation and marginalisation.

A History That Should Make Us Pause

History offers many examples of knowledge being placed under pressure by political, technological or institutional change. But the comparisons need to be made carefully.

Libraries have disappeared through war, neglect, ideological conflict, administrative restructuring and simple indifference. The reasons have not always been the same, and no single historical analogy adequately explains the present.

The useful lesson is simpler.

Civilisations are remembered not merely through monuments but through what they choose to preserve.

India's intellectual inheritance itself was never static. It travelled through monasteries, temples, courts, universities, private collections, archives and libraries. Texts survived because generations considered their preservation worthwhile.

The question today is not whether every old building should be preserved. It is whether every important institution should be given a future.

That is a very different question.

The Architecture of Power

Buildings communicate priorities.

A grand new administrative complex says something about efficiency, consolidation and the physical image of a modern state. There may be sound administrative reasons for replacing ageing buildings. The Central Vista project itself has been presented by the government as an effort to modernise and consolidate government infrastructure.

There is nothing inherently contradictory about that objective and the preservation of a historic library.

The real test comes afterwards.

Can the new architecture accommodate the old memory?

Can a state capable of constructing modern offices also create a purpose-designed national-level knowledge centre for the documents that helped the state understand itself?

Can there be proper storage, conservation laboratories, digitisation facilities, research rooms, public access and technology-enabled retrieval — rather than treating the library as an inconvenient occupant to be fitted somewhere later?

These are not sentimental demands.

They are questions of institutional design.

What Should a Modern Library Look Like?

Perhaps the answer is not to defend the old CSL building at all costs.

Perhaps the more constructive demand is to build something better.

Imagine a Central Secretariat Knowledge Centre designed specifically for the twenty-first century: high-density archival storage, conservation facilities, digitisation laboratories, an open research library, accessible reading rooms, specialist collections, searchable digital repositories and adequate space for librarians and researchers.

Imagine an institution where an old government report can be retrieved digitally in seconds, but where the original document can also be examined by a scholar who needs to understand its paper, annotations, provenance or context.

That would not be nostalgia.

It would be modernisation with memory.

And perhaps that is what a modern state should aspire to.

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Krishan Gopal Sharma

The author is a freelance journalist and retired officer from the Indian Information Service. Views are personal.