MADURAI: The Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court has directed the higher education department secretary to constitute a committee to inquire into the allegations of illegal purchase of books for public libraries.
While hearing a petition filed by S Krishnan in last month, a division bench of then Acting Chief Justice R Mahadevan, who is presently Justice in the Supreme Court, and GR Swaminathan had said the petitioner brought to notice the scandalous state of affairs prevalent in the procurement of books for public libraries in the state.
The Director of Public Library is the authority to procure books for the public libraries in Tamil Nadu. He issues notifications calling for responses from publishers interested in supplying books. Though norms stipulate that the year of the publication of the books should not be changed, the bench had noted that there were violations aplenty.
The court said the petitioner brought to the fore that the books of writers of yore such as Thiru Vi Ka, A Sa Gnana Sambanthan, Na Parthasarathy and others have been re-published as if they are published recently. Books that have been nationalised and those books whose copyrights have expired were chosen for such re-publication.
Since the legal heirs of the writers cannot complain of copyright violation, the fraudsters could resort to such re-publication and re-packaging with false titles and book covers with impunity. “The petitioner’s contention that the respondents must adopt best practices and that procurement of books should not be in breach of their own conditions is beyond cavil.
There is a condition that once a book is purchased for a public library, it cannot be purchased again for the next five years. It is seen that this condition has been flagrantly breached. Nationalised books are re-printed and published under different titles and authors’ names and procured every year. This is nothing short of a scam,” the court said.