Deadline passes but schoolchildren still without textbooks

Islamabad

Scores of students at the Federal Directorate of Education-run government schools in the federal capital continue to be stressed out for being without textbooks even four weeks into the new academic year.

After learning about the National Book Foundation’s failure to provide around 40 per cent of the local schoolchildren with free textbooks by the middle of the last month, minister Dr Tariq Fazal Chaudhry, whose Capital Administration and Development Division regulates the education sector in Islamabad, had ordered the supply of books to the schools by April 30.

But even after the passage of that deadline, scores of students still await the delivery of course books.

The NBF insists the minister’s orders have almost been complied with. However, the FDE disagrees saying almost 20 per cent of the schoolchildren are still without books.

The FDE, which oversees more than 420 government schools in Islamabad, has engaged the NBF for provision of free textbooks to schoolchildren totalling around 0.2 million as a constitutional obligation.

The foundation gets the books printed by different presses, including privately-owned ones, before delivering them to the directorate at the start of every academic session.

A source at the FDE insisted the NBF had so far supplied books for around 80 per cent schoolchildren.

He said he was not sure that the rest of the books were delivered to the directorate by the end of May.

Another FDE official said the directorate should be tasked with printing textbooks on its own for the relief of local schoolchildren as the NBF’s book delivery system had turned out to be very slow.

He asserted that the directorate had placed the book order at the ‘right time’ but the NBF was unable to deliver it on time.

When contacted, NBF secretary Aftab Ahmad Soomro claimed that his organisation foundation had supplied almost all the grade 1-8 course books demanded by the FDE to its resource supply centres for onward distribution to the respective schools.

“We’re responsible for delivering books to the FDE resource centres from where the respective schools are to collect them. As of now, almost all textbooks for 1-8 grades are at the resource centres,” he said.

The NBF secretary also said some schools had yet to collect the books from resource centres.

He said the NBF began the printing of the textbooks for ninth and 10th grades only after the Federal Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education formally approved their contents and since that approval came late last month, the printing and delivery of those books to the FDE would take some time, maybe a fortnight.