June 12: Janak Education Materials Centre has asked the booksellers to visit its regional offices across the country for the school textbooks of the upcoming academic session.

Although the country is now under restriction orders to control COVID-19, the textbooks required for the academic session 2021/22 have already been printed and dispatched to provincial offices of the JEMC, informed Chitra Acharya, spokesperson for the JEMC.

“This year’s academic session will start from June 15. There will be no shortage of textbooks for the upcoming academic session, therefore the book sellers and schools themselves can visit our regional offices for textbooks,” Acharya added. He said that 1,100 booksellers listed by the JEMC would deliver the books to schools across the country. The government has already decided to allow the stationeries to open considering the arrival of the new academic session.

The JEMC has also requested to the police administration to facilitate the booksellers to transport and sell the textbooks of new academic year. The Janak Education Materials Centre has estimated that 17 million textbooks are required for the students from grade 4 to 10 in the new academic year.

However, the JEMC does not print the textbooks of grade one to grade three. The private publications print them, as JEMC does not have capacity to print the textbooks of bigger sizes. Acharya said they would print the grade textbooks of grade 1 to 3 from next year as they had set up a new printing press for them.

Likewise, the JEMC has also started printing textbooks of grade 11 and 12.

Meanwhile, a meeting of the Central Textbook Monitoring Committee held on Friday asked the publishers to replace the old map of Nepal by pasting the new one on the pages.

The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology on Wednesday directed the officials not to circulate textbooks having the old map of the country.

source: risingnepal, 13 June 2021