Poor textbook distribution

The news about textbooks not reaching students of the remote regions of Nepal is quite disturbing in the sense that it might discourage Nepali children from attending school. That this is happening at a time when the government is struggling to encourage more and more parents to send their children to school is reason enough for worry. What is hard to digest is that while textbooks are not reaching children who need it the most, 300,000 sets of books are lying unused across the country.



We must understand here that this is just not another piece of news report as it concerns the future of our country. While we may have valid reasons to crib about how bad the quality of education and infrastructure is in the public schools of our country, they are easily still the backbone of our education system. It is in these very schools that Nepal’s finest bureaucrats and diplomats, both past and present, have received their initial grooming.



The fact that serious loopholes have been seen in the distribution system in areas where the responsibility has been thrust upon the private sector also raises another pertinent question: How wise is it to involve the private sector, which is primarily driven by the motive of making profit, in works that concern basic health and education?



In this case, what essentially happened was that the private sector players that took on the responsibility of publishing and supplying textbooks in the eastern and western regions of the country did not bother to distribute the books in remote districts because that was simply not lucrative enough for them. This also points to a serious anomaly that the government made when they decided to involve the private sector: It should have included a clause in the contract making it mandatory for them to supply the textbooks to every nook and cranny of the regions for which they had taken on the responsibility.



Since still 288,000 sets (each set consists of five different subject books) of textbooks are lying undistributed until now, a few months before the end of the present academic year, publisher Janak Education Materials Limited and distributor Sajha Prakashan are sure to incur huge losses. Unfortunately, Sajha Prakashan’s lackluster balance sheet may also have a telling effect on the literary space of the country.



It is through the profit that Sajha Prakashan makes through the distribution of school textbooks that it has been able to provide subsidies and bring out outstanding literary magazines such as Garima but that is something that it might not be able to do when it itself is not able to stand on its own feet.

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