Director-general of the Department of Education, Lawa Dev Awasthi, came down heavily on state-run as well as private publishers and distributors of school textbooks yesterday for their failure to supply the reading materials to the students in far-off districts.

He said at a programme, “Noodles and cold drinks are available in every nook and corner, but school textbooks are not.”

“Shortage of textbooks has been persisting, though we have been allocating needful resources to make reading materials available to the students for free,” Awasthi pointed, criticising the state-owned Janak Education Material Centre and Sajha Prakashan as well as private publishers and distributors concerned for failing to print and distribute the textbooks on time.

The reports revealed students have not been able to choose subjects of their interest due to the unavailability of books. The reports point at swindling of freeship funds. At the programme that had Education Journalists’ Group as the organiser, audio-visual records of ‘public-hearing session’ in the four districts were shared. Awasthi stressed the need for an effective textbook printing and distribution mechanism to cope with textbook shortage. The Textbook Monitoring Sub-committee yesterday asked JEMC to print 1.25 lakh books per day to meet the demand.

source: The Himalayan Tims,22 Dec 2012