Courtesy: The Sentinel
'Textbooks of the minor languages like Bishnupriya Manipuri, Manipuri, Garo, Nepali and others are very late’
By our Staff Reporter
GUWAHATI, March 4: Due to late submission of manuscripts of textbooks by the State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) to the Assam State Textbooks Production and Publication Corporation (ASTPPC), the latter has not been able to publish textbooks on time, leading to scarcity of textbooks in the market. Though students of the government schools have got almost all of their textbooks free of cost, students of private schools have not been getting them.
As the procedure goes, the SCERT has to submit manuscripts of textbooks of class I to VIII to the ASTPPC by September-October every year so as to enable to the Corporation to publish and distribute the books among the district headquarters by January. The cost of the production and publication of the textbooks is borne by the Sarba Siksha Abhiyan (SSA).
However, this year, the SCERT submitted manuscripts to the Corporation till February 26 leading to the delay in production and publication of textbooks. According to sources, textbooks of the minor languages like Bishnupriya Manipuri, Manipuri, Garo, Nepali and others were very late. According to sources, the corporation publishes on its own the textbooks that are just reprinted. However, in the event of publication of textbooks in accordance with the new syllabi, the Corporation cannot do anything unless it gets the manuscripts from the SCERT on time. This year, about 140 of the 257 manuscripts submitted by the SCERT to the ASTPPC are fresh textbooks in accordance with the new syllabi.
Sources in the ASTPPC alleged that the manuscripts of textbooks sent to them by the SCERT in the ‘DBD form’ were done with inexperienced people, and as a results the manuscripts had a large number of errors. “We had to correct the errors ourselves, and that also took extra time,” the sources said.
“Textbooks of a number of classes have not been received as yet. The students and their guardians keep coming to collect textbooks, but we fail to provide them,” an employee of Guwahati Book Depot, a book shop located at Panbazar in the city, told this reporter. An employee of Gyandeep, another book shop also at Panbazar, also told this reporter the same story.
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