MIANWALI, April 24: A squad of 24 monitoring supervisors of Education Department was seen on Thursday tearing the pages from textbooks carrying the pictures of President Pervez Musharraf and former chief minister Pervaiz Elahi at a government book depot. The book depot is located at the Government High School.

The monitors, after receiving orders from senior officials, started the operation of purging the books of ‘political influence of the previous government’. The previous government published photographs and messages of the president and the then chief minister in all textbooks from class one to 10.

A depot official, seeking anonymity, told Dawn that there were more than 50,000 books in the store and the monitors would take at least one week to complete the job. He said the pulled-apart pages were being signed by the operation in charge and then bundled to Lahore.

The previous government installed former servicemen as monitors to check missing facilities in schools and attendance of teachers. District Monitoring Officer Saifullah was transferred recently.

Acting Monitoring Officer Aamir Shah, however, refused to comment on the action. Nearly, 500,000 textbooks are distributed to students of public schools in the district.