The National Book Trust (NB

• T , an autonomous institution under the Ministry of Human Resource Development, is planning to host book fairs at the panchayat level to encourage the reading habit in villages. The NBT is set to launch an ambitious scheme called the Panchayat Pustak Mela (Panchayat Book Fair), whose aim would be to organise regular book fairs in rural areas across the country. A senior official told The Hindu that, for starters, the NBT may test the waters with a book fair across the panchayat bodies in Maoist-affected Chhattisgarh. The NBT recently brought out eight books in dialects used in the Bastar region of the state, in Devnagri script.