National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL), in a letter to Prime
Minister Shri Narendra Modi, has suggested releasing of digital copies of the
text books on the websites of education departments and even schools, so that
the e-books can easily be accessed by parents and students on time.
This
is the season of reopening of schools all over the country and the parents,
often line up before the designated bookshops to buy text books for their
children. And the most common problem they face is that the books are
often out of print and/or not available and the children have to wait for weeks
and months before they can lay their hands on the text books. Sometimes due to
short supply of text books they are sold on premium forcing parents to bear
extra cost. This affects their ability to cope up with the syllabus and
has an overall effect of slowing down the system and bringing enormous parental
anxiety
Nowadays,
computer access is very wide and if the textbooks are uploaded on websites and
allowed downloading of digital copies of text books, parents can arrange for
printed copies to their children on time and nobody suffers by this. It
is an archaic idea that the text books are still to be printed centrally by a
Government department and should be responsible for the distribution in the
country".
Decentralizing this operation will not only
speed up the distribution, but will also bring about timely access to the study
material, cost saving, time and energy saving of the concerned departments responsible
for finalization of tenders for printing and distribution of text books and no
room for corruption in printing and distribution system."
Releasing
digital copies of the text books on the websites of education departments and
even schools could trigger local business opportunities for printing the
books in colour in any required format by the local entrepreneurs to keep up
with the requirements. Apart from this it would save millions of rupees of the
education department which can be utilized for up gradation of schools etc.
VK
Saxena
NCCL
Ahmedabad
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