Cash crunch hits free textbook scheme

Departmental tussle means books are not delivered

PESHAWAR:

Despite repeated assurances and claims by the provincial government, the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) Elementary and Secondary Education Department and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Text Book Board have failed to deliver free textbooks to the schools across the province.

To make things complicated for the students, these books are not available in the open market too.

“From Monday the education department is going to start its enrolment drive in schools and all the male and female district education officers (DEOs) have been asked to make efforts in this regard,” said an official of the education department while talking to The Express Tribune.

“The drive is launched each year on July 25 and the Education Minister Shahram Khan Tarakai had assured that books will be delivered to schools before July 15,” he added.

“This is the first time that the government has failed to deliver books to students in the province due to the resistance from the finance department to release funds,” he said.

The Text Book Board has spent Rs4 billion on the printing of the books but the process was delayed due to non-release of funds and now despite the availability and printing of books its distribution has been a major hurdle.

Background

It may be recalled that the K-P Finance Department had declined to release Rs9 billion funds for the provision of free textbooks to schools, recommending that Text Book Board should finance it through its own resources.

After the decision the text book board stopped the delivery of books to schools on the ground that it could not finance it on its own.

The board is supposed to complete the process by April 15 every year.

There are 4,447,000 students in more than 29,000 public schools across the province. The annual results were announced on May 31 and from June 1 summer vacations began.

Normally after results new textbooks are handed over to students and they are assigned homework before the summer holidays. This did not happen this year.

The text book board had made it clear that it would not use its own funds for the purpose and that the finance department had to release the allocated funds, further delaying the entire process.

Later both the departments reached an agreement to start supply of books before July 15 but there is no sign till July 23 that the books will be delivered.

It is worth mentioning here that the provincial government provides textbooks to schools from primary to higher secondary level free of cost each year and for this purpose Rs4 to 5 billion is released to the text book board by the government.

“Books are printed and then supplied to schools before April 15 but this year the process is yet to start despite the fact that the deadline has long elapsed,” said the official, adding that schools have announced summer vacations from May 31 to August 14 but all the children are without books and because of this students have not been given homework.

“This is just waste of time for these children,” he observed.

“The finance department has failed to release Rs5 billion for this year and it has yet to release Rs4 billion funds of the previous year,” another official said.

The officials claimed that books had been published by the printers in June but the supply was pending due to non-payment.

 

Published in The Express Tribune, July 25^th, 2022.