KATHMANDU, May 27: The textbooks of at least three subjects are yet to be provided to students in various schools even after six weeks of the beginning of the new academic session which started from April 15.
63,000 students of five mountain districts yet to get textbooks
Keshav Puri, president of the Guardians' Association Nepal, said that the textbooks of compulsory Environment Science of Grades 4-5 and Math of Grade 7 and optional subjects of Grade 9-10 are yet to be provided to the students of many hill and some Tarai districts. "Many students are yet to get the complete set of textbooks," he added.
According to the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MoEST), the school textbooks should be supplied to the districts before two weeks of the beginning of a new academic session and supplied to the schools before one week of the new session.The school textbooks should have been supplied to the districts before April 1 as per the rules for the new academic session beginning from April 14.According to the Department of Education (DoE), the state-owned Janak Education Materials Center (JEMC) has been authorized to print 19.2 million copies of textbooks of Grades 6 to 10 while private publishers have been allowed to print 16.5 million copies of textbooks of Grades 1 to 5.Baikuntha Aryal, spokesperson for the MoEST, admitted that the textbooks of a few subjects including optional subjects might not have been supplied to the schools yet. "We have a stock of the required sets of textbooks already printed for all the school students," said Aryal. "It's the weakness of schools or distributors to supply the necessary books to the schools or students," he added. "If we are asked, we will immediately manage to supply the textbooks to the areas where they are unavailable."
