KAKKANAD: Ever since the new academic year started in the first week of June, the Kerala Books and Publications Society (KPBS) seems to be groping in the dark to distribute sufficient study materials to schools in the district.
A report prepared by the Education Department shows that there is a shortage of 1.77 lakh titles of books in the district, owing to the unscientific way in which their distribution is being done. The report was prepared based on data provided by the AEO to the Deputy Director of Education. “The intending for the textbooks began in January, and was completed in a few weeks. However, the KPBS has failed to provide sufficient number of textbooks to schools. The unscientific method adopted in intending and delivering the textbooks to ‘societies’ has led to the shortage,” said M K Shine Mon, Deputy Director Education, Ernakulam.
As per the report, most of the schools, both English medium and Malayalam medium, are struggling to provide textbooks of Class-VIII for the subjects of Social Science, Mathematics, Basic Science and Hindi.
Meanwhile, textbooks of Class-XII and Class-X for the subjects English, Hindi and Social Science are in excess.
The SCERT has listed a total of 228 titles of textbooks for students of Class-I - Class-X in the State. The headmasters reportedly quoted 5 per cent more than the actual strength of the students while submitting textbooks through online intending.
“The issue raised by the officials are baseless as there is no scarcity of textbooks in the State. The improper intending procedures had resulted in dumping of the textbooks in societies. As per the intending data, we got 2.51 crore requests for textbooks. But, as per the UID statistics, only 2.40 crore is sufficient. However, we printed 5 percent more textbooks than originally required,” Chadrasekharan Unnithan, State coordinator, textbook distribution, said.
“As a solution, the DEO, AEO and DD should intervine in the problem to help reduce the scarcity of textbooks by inter-circulating the excess textbooks,” he said.