BENGALURU: Schools have reopened, but several CBSE schools in the city are reeling under shortage of NCERT (National Council of Educational Research and Training) textbooks, thus affecting their academic schedules. While schools say there is a shortage of books for classes 6-9, the worst hit is class 9, where a completely new syllabus has been rolled out. While the online PDFs are available on the website, schools say that do not suffice. “Teachers find it hard in language classes, when students don’t have text books. Group work and homework assignments get messy. Teachers spend more time in dictating content, scanning pages, and arranging PDFs etc. Many hours are lost from actual teaching. Subjects like Science and Social Science suffer because activities depend on in-text diagrams and maps.Schools are depending on NCERT e-books available on ncert.nic.in and the DIKSHA app. Keeping one set in libraries per 15 students as reference copies is a temporary solution,” said Veda Prashanth, principal, Hill Rock National Public School. While most schools use NCERT based books till class 6, the practice is to resort to NCERT for the higher grades. “The distributors tell us that they don’t have the required copies we need and they send us in batches as and when they get it. They don’t have a idea as to when will the textbook be available for Social Science for grade 9,” said principal of a leading chain of schools. “It is a huge issue. We are not able to make bulk orders. We have uploaded soft copy on our internal platform and have told students to use it,” said another principal. Parents are equally irked. “We are taking print outs after print outs every day. What a waste of resources is this? Isn’t it common knowledge for NCERT that books should be made available by the time schools reopen. And grade 9 is not a small grade where we can help them with some private publishers books,” said Nirmal R, a parent. “As NCERT is the base for boards and other competitive exams, the worry is even more,” said Veda. P D Anjanappa of Sree Dhanalakshmi Book Centre on Avenue Road says he gets panicked customers daily enquiring for NCERT books. “We have no stocks. This year, no books have come. All the old ones are sold out. We see parents and students panicking, as they hop from one shop to another,” he said.Sandeep Pai S, chairman of Bangalore Sahodaya, said it has hit the learning process. “There is basically a difference in the academic calendar between schools in North and South India. While North Indian schools need the textbooks only by July, that is not the case for schools here. We have to finish our class 9 exam soon so that we are get them prepared for class 10. Class 10 is a continuation of class 9. How can we prepare students for the next class too and launch programmes for toppers,” he said.“There was a similar issue in the previous years when they changed the textbooks of other grades. NCERT should have seen this coming,” he said.
