The Poor : Print culture helped the poor people significantly in the following ways:

• Very cheap small books were brought to the markets in nineteenth-century Madras towns and sold at cross-roads, allowing poor people travelling to markets to buy them.
• Public libraries were set up from the early twentieth century, expanding the access to books. These libraries were located mostly in cities and towns, and at times in prosperous villages. For rich local patrons, setting up a library was a way of acquiring prestige.
• From the late nineteenth-century, cases of caste discrimination were published. For example: Jyotiba Phule, the Maratha pioneer of ‘low caste’ protest movements, wrote about the injustices of the caste system in his Gulamgiri(1871).
• Social reformers tried to restrict excessive drinking among them to bring literacy and sometimes, to propagate the message of nationalism.