ISLAMABAD, March 12: The National Assembly Speaker, Chaudhry Amir Hussain, on Friday directed the federal ministers and the parliamentary secretaries to ensure their presence in the House and give complete and timely replies to the questions of the members.

"If the ministers are preoccupied and cannot attend the proceedings, then the parliamentary secretaries of their relevant ministries should be briefed properly or any other cabinet member be asked to respond to the questions," the speaker ruled during the question-hour session of the House.

The speaker has to assert himself when his attention is drawn towards the thin presence of the ministers and inability of the parliamentary secretaries to properly answer the supplementary questions.

The members mainly from the opposition deplored that answers to their questions were not being provided despite that they had submitted them to the assembly secretariat in the previous sessions.

The attention of the speaker was also drawn towards a question in which the reply given was totally different from what had been asked. Shabir Ahmed Khan had asked the education minister to provide the province-wise number of Pakistani students studying in different educational institutions in Afghanistan. While the answer by the Education Minister Zobaida Jalal was that her ministry had not received any request from the Pakistani students for studies in Afghanistan.

The opposition members, however, took complete advantage of the inability of the treasury side to defend the government and repeatedly insisted that parliament was not given due weightage.

At one time, parliamentary secretary for education Deewan Jaffar admitted that he was not prepared to answer a question asked from him as he was not properly briefed.

During the question-hour session, the House was informed that the provincial governments as well as the Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT) were distributing free of cost textbooks to the students of Classes I to V.

Punjab government has decided to distribute free textbooks worth Rs350 million, ICT Rs7.5 million, Sindh 164 million, NWFP Rs100 million and Balochistan Rs26.94 million.

About initiating KG classes for the children of three years, the parliamentary secretary said the early childhood education was an integral part of primary education for which the ministry had formalized "Kachi Class" as early childhood education (ECE) and placed it in the national scheme of studies.