ICT students still without textbooks

Students of all the educational institutes working under Federal Directorate of Education (FDE) are still without textbooks after the start of new academic year last week. The new academic year began in all the FDE-run institutes on April 11, but FDE could not manage to arrange textbooks for the students so far.
Every year, FDE provides free of cost textbooks to the students of public sector schools from Class-I to Middle Standard. The parents are fearing that their children will not able to complete the syllabus, if they are not provided the books on time.
"It will be difficult to complete the syllabus after two-day holidays likely to be announced by the government in the upcoming days," Nazia, a mother of two children said. While a student of Islamabad Model College for Boys (IMCB) F-8/4 said, "We are coming to the college regularly and now our teachers are trying to manage old books from the students who have been promoted to the next classes so that our time get not wasted."
Students, who are perturbed over the non-availability of text books said, "The syllabus we cover before summer vacation is assigned us for revision during the vacation but it will be difficult for us to deal with our home assignments when we have not gone through the assigned chapters".
Parent of a student of Islamabad College for Boys (ICB) G-6/3 said, "We have tried to search textbooks in different markets but these are not even available in the markets. We are managing textbooks by exchanging textbooks with other students". A student of Islamabad Model College for Girls (IMCG) G-6/1-3 said that the teachers were saying that the textbooks would be provided by next week.
Talking to newsmen, Deputy Director in FDE Zulfiqar informed, "We are not sure when textbooks will be published and delivered to the directorate. It can take a week or more than one week". This year, the task of publishing the textbooks was given to the Punjab Textbook Board instead of National Book Foundation (NBF). "I don't now exactly but some case of publishing authority was in proceeding in the court which winded up on April 5 after which the work on publishing textbooks was started," Zulfiqar said.
While another official of FDE said the matters were delaying and pending due to frequent change of Director Generals after every few months. The directorate has not any permanent DG to handle the affairs smoothly and the recently appointed new Director General FDE Chaudhry Mohammad Nazir rarely visits the directorate. About delay in provision of textbooks, the official said the delay was on the part of authority which was responsible to publish and provide textbooks to the directorate.