More than half of visually impaired students in the country do not have Braille textbooks, according to the organisations of the disabled.

Organising a news conference in the Capital on Thursday, the Nepal Association of the Blind (NAB) and the Nepal Blind Welfare Association (NBWA) said that around 60 percent school-level visually impaired students have not received textbooks for the current academic session. The government provides textbooks to all the school-level students free of cost.

According to NAB Director Amrit Rai, only 578 blind students have received their full set of books. Around 1,500 visually impaired students are studying in 78 community schools across the country. Rai claimed that the Janak Educational Materials Centre (JEMC) did not publish a single optional subject Braille textbook for grade nine and 10 and no books were published for grade five. Even books for compulsory subjects were delivered only three months after the academic session began.

“The books are never supplied on time. We have to depend on audio clips for study which is not feasible in a country with 12 hours of power cuts,” complained Asma Aryal, a student at Namuna Machhindra School in Lalitpur. After the JEMC failed to deliver the books, the Ministry of Education and the National Planning Commission had forwarded a proposal a few weeks ago to the Cabinet to provide publication rights for Braille books to the NBWA and the NAB. However, there has been little progress regarding the proposal.

source: republica,25 jan 2013