KHYBER: The education department will start the distribution of free textbooks among the students of all government schools from next week in Khyber tribal district with officials conceding an overall deficiency of 30 percent in comparison to their required number of books.
Officials said that textbooks were already dispatched to three tehsils including Bara, Landi Kotal and Jamrud where various distribution points were set up and volunteer teachers and students were engaged to separate books according to subjects and grades.
They said that in order to reach out to students in far-flung localities, a number of teachers were assigned special duty to take the free books to those destinations.
Teachers and parents in Tirah were, however, apprehensive about timely provision of free textbooks to students of the valley due to security reasons as most of the primary schools had not yet reopened after the completion of the winter holidays.
Officials said that provincial education department had earlier conveyed to them that like the previous two or three years, there would also be a shortage of textbooks in the current year too. They said that district education department was asked to fulfil the deficiency from the old books they had collected from volunteer students and their parents.
As per official formula, provincial government has imposed a 25 percent and 20 percent cut of new books for KG and grade one, respectively, while the quota of grade two and grade three was also slashed by 15 and 20 percent, respectively.
As for the grades four and five were concerned, students of these grades would get 35 and 40 percent less from the newly-provided free books, respectively.
Subjects, which have been affected most in the ‘cut formula’ for free textbooks distribution, include creative art, Nazara Quran, Pashto and mathematics, mostly for primary grade students.
Officials said that the percentage of shortage of new books among middle grade and metric level was much lower than the primary level and they expressed the hope that the deficiency could be covered with the old books they had already collected.
Published in Dawn, March 23rd, 2025
