LAHORE, April 1: The Punjab education department has placed an order to the Punjab Textbook Board to print around two million additional sets of books for their free distribution in view of the 'possible shortage' in the province.
The department's Punjab Monitoring and Implementation Unit (PMIU) has already distributed 9.88 million sets (350 million textbooks) at the district level under the chief minister's reforms' programme.
According to the plan, the distribution of books at schools started across the Punjab on Thursday. All the textbooks of Class-I and II have been clipped in one set, while those for Class-III, IV and V in two sets each.
The Punjab government had taken the decision to distribute free textbooks among the students of the public sector schools to ensure maximum participation of children in the mainstream education.
Other measures to enhance students' participation include waiving of tuition fees up to matriculation, Rs200 stipend for girl students, provision of furniture and other missing facilities and, above all, provision of qualified teachers.
Although there are complaints regarding shortage of textbooks in some districts, the PMIU officials say the complaints at this time are not justifiable because each district is required to make internal adjustments of textbooks at the tehsil level and in some cases at the district level.
"The exercise of distributing free textbooks among students as well as making internal adjustments will take two weeks to conclude where the shortage of textbooks exist," said PMIU's deputy director (monitoring and evaluation) Khurram Khan.
In view of the possible increase in enrolment, Mr Khan said the PMIU had already got printed textbooks 10 per cent more than the previous year's enrolment in schools.
Answering a question, he said the unit had distributed the textbooks not merely on the demands of the districts, but on the basis of reliable data of students' enrolment developed by the Educational Management Information System. The EMIS data was relied upon by the federal and provincial governments as well as donor agencies, he added.
He claimed that some of the districts had made highly unjustifiable demands. Citing an example, he said a district had demanded 110 per cent more textbooks than required. "As the textbooks cost a lot, the PMIU cannot distribute those blindly," he added.
However, he said, when it would come to the real shortage of textbooks, the PMIU would be ready to fulfil all demands by the end of this month. He said its staff was also working in the field to monitor the actual distribution of textbooks among students.
Of the Rs500 million project, he said the PMIU had saved Rs130 million that would now be spent on procuring additional two million sets of textbooks. Mr Khan said the shortage of textbooks was a positive sign for the PMIU because the extra demand meant that the objective of bringing more and more children to education was achieved.
Answering another question, he said the government would also commission an organization to conduct a third-party validation of the project.