BENGALURU: From the next academic year, students of Karnataka schools will carry a lighter load on their shoulders. Following repeated appeals by parents and educationists, the state government has taken steps to reduce the weight of school bags by cutting 50 per cent of textbooks for the academic year 2024-25. Students from classes 1 to 10 will now be issued textbooks twice in the academic year, divided into two parts (Summative Assessment 1 and 2).
In 2019, the Department of State Education Research and Training (DSERT) formed a committee to look into the matter, taking into account stakeholders such as educationists, doctors, legal advisers and paediatricians who had taken up an extensive study to come up with an optimum bag weight for students in different classes. The committee held a meeting on October 6 this year and submitted a report on October 12. The government issued the order last week. With the department allowing two textbooks, students will have to use part 1 for the first half of the year and the second for the latter half.
The committee in its report concluded that for students in classes 1 and 2, the ideal bag weight should be 1.5 kg to 2 kg. For classes 3 to 5, students can carry 2 kg to 3 kg and for classes 6 to 8, the permitted limit is 3 kg to 4 kg. For students in classes 9 and 10, the committee recommended 4 kg to 5 kg. It also said that the bag load should be checked at schools and monitored at the district and block level in clusters to see that the government order is being followed.
This move will ease the physical strain off children’s shoulders. Suggestions also included that textbooks that include additional reading material should be printed as separate books and kept in schools. “The literature can be used during classes and collected back at the end, keeping them in schools,” read the report.
With the government accepting these suggestions, the printing cost for two textbooks in a year will see a spike. In the current academic year (2023-2024), the Karnataka Textbooks Society (KTBS) printed over 6,39,83,899 textbooks, which included 566 titles. The cost incurred was Rs 3,23,31,93,175. With two textbooks a year, KTBS will print 984 titles, and this is expected to increase the printing cost by Rs 10 crore, according to the report.