PESHAWAR, March 21: The Frontier Printers and Publishers Association on Wednesday staged a demonstration in protest against the proposed dissolution of the Textbook Board, which provides textbooks on subsidised prices to the students in the public sector all over the province, and revival of the old system of private publishers.

The protesters at the demonstration held outside the Peshawar Press Club said the new policy confined the right of education to the affluent segments by making it expensive.

Speaking on the occasion, a leader of the publishers, Mohammad Tayyab, said the private publishers were responsible to provide the textbooks to the students from 1947 to 1962 but they had failed to cater to their needs. In 1962, he said, the government of Gen Ayub Khan had constituted a commission to look into the system and on its recommendations set up textbook boards to provide the books at lower prices to the students.

He said the boards hired the services of printers and publishers to meet their targets at the beginning of every academic year.

They had been providing books to the students for the past 45 years satisfactorily but now some agents of multinational companies were conspiring to destroy the educational base of the country by replacing the boards with the private publishing houses, he said. He said their livelihood was linked to the boards.