KATHMANDU, March 11: The Janak Education Materials Center (JEMC), the state-owned publications, has claimed that the school textbooks of Grades 1-10 are almost ready for the academic session beginning April 14.
Mahesh Prasad Timilsina, the general manager of the JEMC, said that the JEMC has already printed 400,000 sets of textbooks of Grades 5-10 for the next session. “JEMC has completed printing of 18 million copies of textbooks, which is 80 percent of the requirements. Additionally, we have also printed 50,000 sets of textbooks of Grades 1-4,” he added.
Forty million school textbooks of Grades 1 to 10 will be needed for the upcoming academic session. The JEMC informed that it would print a total of 22.5 million textbooks for the next session and the remaining 17.5 million copies will be printed by the private-sector publishers. JEMC prints textbooks of Grades 5-10 and the private sector prints the textbooks of Grades 1-4, according to the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MoEST).
JEMC yet to print textbooks
According to the JEMC, the private sector has so far printed 400,000 sets of textbooks of Grades 1-4 and has yet to print 300,000 sets. “We have about a month remaining for the new session to start,” said Timilsina. “The remaining printing work will be completed on time,” he claimed.
However, all the governments since 2008 have failed to deliver the school textbooks to the students or schools in time, according to the Guardians Association Nepal (GAN).
The students of remote five Himalayan districts could not get textbooks in time this year again due to mismanagement in delivery though the academic session in these five districts began on February 13. The government officials claimed that the textbooks could not be supplied in time in these five districts due to snowfall.
Out of total 77 districts in the country, the new academic session in the schools in five mountain districts -- Humla, Dolpa, Jumla, Mustang and Manang -- begins on February 13 and in the remaining districts on April 14. There are more than 63,000 students enrolled in the government schools in the mountain districts, according to Center for Education and Human Resources Development.
Before 2006, JEMC would print all the textbooks but after that private sector was also assigned some of the printing work. The private-sector publishers were assigned to print the textbooks of Grades 1 to 5 but from this year they have been asked to print the books of Grades 1 to 4 only.
According to MoEST, the textbooks should be supplied to the schools two weeks before the start of the new academic session.
In the past, the government used to begin the printing of school textbooks from mid-July for the next academic year, according to the MoEST. However, this time the work got delayed.
