More than two lakh books belonging to Delhi’s Tulsi Sadan Library have remained largely packed away for about 15 years after the collection was displaced by construction of the Delhi Metro’s Mandi House station. The prolonged closure is now entangled with the Central Vista redevelopment, raising a larger question about what happens to public institutions when urban infrastructure projects move faster than the plans to restore them.
Tulsi Sadan Library was the regional languages section of the Central Secretariat Library, an institution under the Union Ministry of Culture. Its collection included books in 14 Indian languages: Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. The section was opened in 1972 to commemorate 400 years of the Ramcharitmanas and was housed on the National School of Drama premises at Bahawalpur House on Bhagwan Das Road.
That location changed when the Delhi Metro station at Mandi House was constructed. The library was shut in 2011, and its collection was moved to one room on the first floor of an office complex in R K Puram. According to the account by The Indian Express, the room can be accessed only through the office of the Central Adoption Resource Authority. Photographs reviewed by the newspaper showed books in cartons bearing the logo of Agarwal Packers and Movers, while the room itself was described as being in a state of disrepair.
The central issue is not simply that a library was shifted. It is that a temporary relocation created by an infrastructure project appears to have become a long-term loss of access. The Culture Ministry’s own annual reports show how the language used to describe the closure changed over time, while the collection remained unavailable to most readers.
The ministry’s 2011-12 annual report said the library had been closed temporarily from August 2011 because of construction of the new Metro station at Mandi House. The 2014-15 report said Delhi Metro construction had been completed and that action was under way to reconstruct the building. In 2015-16, the ministry stated that the library would be opened shortly because the National School of Drama was constructing a new building on the same premises.
By 2022-23, however, the annual report described the library as having been closed since 2010 due to Delhi Metro construction. The differing dates and successive assurances matter because they show how an institution can disappear administratively even when its collection continues to exist physically. The books were not reported as destroyed. They were moved, stored and partially retrieved, but the public facility that gave them meaning was not restored in full.
The collection’s condition also highlights the difference between preserving an object and preserving public access. Books held in cartons may remain technically part of a government library, but they cannot serve readers, researchers or language communities in the same way as a functioning, catalogued and accessible branch. The supplied report does not establish the condition of every book or whether the entire collection has been catalogued at its current location. It does establish that most of the books remained locked in storage for years.
Some access has resumed, but only in limited form. The Assamese and Kannada sections were reopened after a portion of the books was retrieved on December 25, 2023, when the sections were inaugurated by then Minister of State for Culture Meenakashi Lekhi. On March 11, 2025, the Hindi section was partially reopened at the Central Secretariat Library in Shastri Bhawan. These steps indicate that the collection has not been abandoned completely, but they also underline the gap between partial retrieval and restoration of the full regional languages library.
That gap is particularly important because the Tulsi Sadan collection was designed as a multilingual public resource rather than a general storage archive. Its 14-language spread gave the library a specific institutional role within Delhi’s cultural and administrative landscape. A closure that lasts for years therefore affects more than a building. It disrupts a public service built around language access, reading, research and the preservation of literary material.
The Central Secretariat Library itself dates back to 1891 and is described in the report as one of the oldest Central government libraries. Its present uncertainty is connected to the Central Vista redevelopment plan, which includes the construction of 10 new Secretariat buildings after the demolition of several existing office complexes. Shastri Bhawan, Krishi Bhawan, Nirman Bhawan and Udyog Bhawan are among the buildings included in the larger redevelopment exercise.
This creates a second displacement problem. The original Tulsi Sadan site was affected by metro construction; the Central Secretariat Library’s current arrangements are now part of a redevelopment process involving the movement of government offices and institutions. In both cases, the physical footprint of public infrastructure is being reorganised. The supplied material does not specify a final site, completion date or detailed rehabilitation plan for the library, leaving the institutional future of the collection unclear.
Urban projects are commonly evaluated through visible outputs: a station opens, a building is demolished, a new complex is planned or a transport corridor becomes operational. The Tulsi Sadan case points to a less visible layer of project impact. Libraries, archives and cultural facilities depend on continuity. Their users may not be counted in construction schedules, but the loss of a reading room or language collection can persist long after engineering work is declared complete.
The ministry’s annual reports provide an important administrative trail because they record the changing status of the library. They show that the closure was initially presented as temporary, followed by references to reconstruction and imminent reopening. The later description of the library as closed since 2010 suggests that the original disruption was not matched by a clearly completed institutional recovery. The report does not explain why the proposed reconstruction did not result in a full reopening, and that unresolved question is central to understanding the case.
The episode also raises questions about responsibility across institutions. The library came under the Culture Ministry, its original premises were associated with the National School of Drama, and the displacement was caused by Delhi Metro construction. Its temporary storage was located in an office complex accessed through the Central Adoption Resource Authority, while the wider future of the Central Secretariat Library is tied to Central Vista redevelopment. The available evidence identifies these institutional connections but does not establish which agency currently has final responsibility for reopening the complete collection.
For residents, the practical consequence is straightforward: a public collection intended to be used has remained inaccessible or only partly accessible for years. For policymakers, the case demonstrates why relocation plans for public institutions must include more than the movement of physical assets. They need a documented temporary facility, responsibility for cataloguing and conservation, a publicly stated reopening schedule and a mechanism for reporting progress when construction is complete.
The evidence currently confirms a long closure, prolonged storage, partial reopening of selected language sections and a new layer of uncertainty created by Central Vista redevelopment. It does not confirm the condition of every book, the final location of the full collection or a date for restoring the entire library. Those are the next facts that need to be established. Until then, Tulsi Sadan Library remains a record of how a temporary infrastructure displacement can become a permanent interruption in public access.
