Fact Check: Is Ministry of Human Resources giving free access to National Digital Library?

Claim: Ministry of Human Resources is giving free access to the National Digital Library and its contents

Rating: True

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What is the rumour about?

• The viral WhatsApp message states how the Union Ministry of Human Resources has opened the National Digital Library of India for the public during the current lockdown. 
• This is done to ensure that people utilise their lockdown period for reading. The ministry has given free access to 3,82,00, 000 books and periodicals for this purpose. 
• The books are available digitally so they can be accessed through any device like smartphones, tablets, computer, where people need to visit this link - https://ndl.iitkgp.ac.in/

Image courtesy: WhatsApp forwards

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Who started the rumour?

• Some citizens of India received the message on their WhatsApp messenger; however, some even received it on their SMS messaging service. 
• When the link is opened, it shows general guidelines on how one can study through the National Digital Library of India (NDLI), thus promoting the "Study From Home" facility.
• According to the basic guidelines, the resources can be accessed without logging in; however, special resources would require login authentication. The sections are separately arranged for school going and college students. People can also browse the website by the source as well as the topic they need to study.

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Image courtesy: National Digital Library website

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Google Trends 

After an analysis of Google Trends with respect to the National Digital Library being freely accessible in India rumour, one can see that the people have been hugely interested to know about the same. The maximum number of searches have been done on April 21, 2020, and the trend seems to be increasing as of today. 

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Image courtesy: Google Trends 

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Republic World did a fact check 

• Republic World did a fact check on the free access to the National Digital Library in India rumour which was circulating on WhatsApp, and the claims were found to be True.

• NDLI was launched as a new initiative by the MHRD in 2018 as a free source providing access to educational content that has been collated from numerous national and international sources. It is a single-window platform to make education available to anyone and everyone. 

• The educational resources are made available for students starting from primary to postgraduate levels. The sources are from multiple subject domains which take the count to 47 million number of items that are available on the NDLI website. The site is managed by IIT Kharagpur. The resources are made available in more than 400 different languages. The website gathers the content made by a variety of institutions and their repositories.

• Students can access technical reports, books, thesis, audio lectures, annual reports, manuals, manuscripts, video lectures, web courses, question papers and solutions and much more.

• NDLI website sources its content from many institutional repositories; however, the featured sources include NPTEL, LibriVox, NCERT, KRISHIKOSH, and INFLIBNET.

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