Students in Bajura without textbooks for four months now

Nowhere is the government's inability to provide students with textbooks can be seen more stark than in far-western Bajura district.

It has been already four months that the academic year has started, but the District Education Office has still not been able to make available textbooks for students of all grades in government-run schools of then district, reports said.

And, though the teachers, students and guardians alike have been making sure that the problems reach the ears of the authorities concerned, they still haven't got assurances that the textbooks would be made available any time soon.

Due to lack of text-books the students of secondary level in this impoverished district have been the most affected. District Education Officer Bir Singh Dhami admitted that over 1,000 students of classes 9 and 10 of the district have still not got the text books prescribed by the curriculum.

As per the statistics maintained by the District Education Office (DEO), there are more than 1,300 students currently studying in secondary level in the district.

The teachers of these schools told Kantipur Daily that most of the students don't have books prescribed by the curriculum. They say they are very concerned because they are almost in the middle of the academic year but the students still haven't got their text books.

"We have kept one set of books of class 9 and 10 provided by the DEO in the school. The respective subject teachers use it to teach in the class," Ganeshram Joshi, principal of Swamikartik Secondary School, told the daily.

And because the government had changed the curriculum from this year onwards, the students can't even use the old text books left by their seniors, adding to their further distress.

The freely distributed primary-level textbooks too haven't reached the hands of the students. DEO has admitted that the grade 1 and 2 books made available by the government are "not enough".

Prem Karki, a class 10 student in one of the government-run schools in the district said, "I think we would have to give our [SLC] exams this year without any books." nepalnews.com Aug 28 08