Chennai: School textbooks have been under the spotlight for all the wrong reasons this academic session. It started with a controversy in the preface of the class 11 Economics textbook which was distributed to a few schools and later withdrawn. Now bookshops across the city say that the Tamil Nadu Textbook Corporation has refused to give them books for sale, restricting availability for students.
Students and their parents who missed buying textbooks from schools or lost them are now being forced to stand in long queues at the textbook corporation’s counter at DPI campus in the city to purchase books. Students are being put to hardship as classes have already started and short tests are also being conducted. S. Vijayan, a bookshop owner in Triplicane, alleged that as the textbook corporation did not supply them textbooks they had to ask parents to go to the DPI campus to buy the books.
Daily, he gets over 400 enquiries asking for Tamil Nadu state textbooks, he said.“Until last year we were selling TN textbooks, but, this year, we are denied the opportunity to sell these textbooks whereas CBSE allows us to sell NCERT books,” he said. T. Muthukumaran, a parent of a class 11 student who was seen standing in the queue at the corporation’s counter at DPI said he joined the serpentine queue at 11.30 am and succeeded in getting the books by 2 pm.
“I had to travel over 25 kilometres from Guduvancherry to DPI on College Road for buying the textbooks. Why is the textbook corporation not selling books through book shops?” he asked.Ten days have passed after schools reopened for class 11 and the controversy in Economics and History textbooks came out in the open, class 11 students are yet to get their textbooks as the state government is undecided about the fate of the controversial preface in the books.
“As we are yet to get the books we are sourcing old textbooks from our alumni and using them as a stop gap arrangement until we get the new books. Some students have taken photocopies of the first two chapters as we will teach only these chapters for the next one month,” head of one of the private matriculation schools in the city, on condition of anonymity, said. An official in the Tamil Nadu Textbook Corporation said as it was a policy decision, it has been referred to the state government.
