Janak Education Materials Center (JEMC) has informed that it has printed all required textbooks for the grade nine and ten for the upcoming academic session.
General Manager of the JEMC Anil Jha said the center printed text books for upper level grades at first with high priority to address the problem of textbooks shortage that occurred every year across the nation.
JEMC has been continuously printing the textbooks for grade 6 to 8. The JEMC has been working to ensure that no student will be deprived of textbooks in new academic session, he added.
The government has allocated Rs. 300 million in loan supports to JEMC after the centre had failed to print required number of textbooks in time due to shortage of printing paper and other materials in the lack of budget.
The government has decided to allow private publication for printing and distributing textbook for grade one to five across country from the new academic session, citing the delay in textbooks on the part of the state owned school textbook publisher JEMC.
According to the data of the Department of Education (DoE), around 40 million textbooks are required for students studying in grade 1-10 across country for new academic session.
Jha said they accorded one month time for printing textbooks for one particular grade. The printing of textbooks will complete on time this year as the JEMC has sufficient printing paper and working manpower.
Suprabhat Bhandari, chairperson of Nepal Guardians Association, said that if students could get textbooks on time this year, this would be a great achievement for the JEMC.
Meanwhile, from this year private publishers have planned to handover the responsibility of textbooks circulation to Sajha Publication.
With a motive to distribute all grade textbooks from a single door system, the private publishers have been mulling to handover the responsibility of textbook distribution to Sajha Publication.
A total of 21 private publishers have been given the responsibility of printing and circulation of textbooks this year.
Deepak Bhandari, representative of the private publishers, said they would decide within few days whether to handover the responsibility to Sajha Publication regarding the distribution of textbooks.
