In an initiative aimed at addressing persistent complaints of teachers and students regarding the poor quality of textbooks, the Textbook Board, on a directive by the provincial chief minister, has banned the use of recycled paper to ensure availability of quality books to students of government and private schools in the province.
In this connection, PTB has also constituted an advisory committee comprising representatives of publishers, paper mill owners and its own officials to monitor the entire process of textbook printing from the next academic session, when 70 million textbooks will be printed for free distribution among students. Publishers and printers have been asked to ensure use of fresh-pulp and not recycled paper in the preparation of books.
A PTB official has informed Business Recorder that 75 percent of the books distributed among students of government schools free of cost are printed through an open tender system, while the remaining 25 percent meant for open market sale to students of private schools are printed through an allocation system. An important difference between the two systems is that while under the open tender system the entire process, including purchase of paper, is done by the publishers themselves, under the allocation system PTB provides paper to the publishers.
A board official has said that PTB would ensure provision of quality paper, carrying PTB watermark, to the printers to combat use of low quality paper. The initiative is undoubtedly commendable, as access to quality textbooks will not only ensure greater durability of the printed material; it will also help get rid of the problem of issuing repeated reprints, which opens the likelihood of more printing errors slipping in.
There is a perception that the use of low-quality paper in the preparation of textbooks has been a part of a larger strategy to create "business" for printers. Further, there are greater chances of printing errors in such slovenly produced books, which can cause serious gaps in students' knowledge of language and facts.
The Government of Pakistan has recently developed a Textbook Policy aimed at ensuring availability of quality textbooks and other learning material with the help of public and private sector publishers. Under this plan, the regulatory role of provincial textbook boards will be gradually upgraded, and textbook development will be left to the private sector publishers, organisations and textbook authors.
As a country's literacy rate is closely linked to availability of quality printed material, including books, mass-scale speedy production of textbooks by printers, most of whom are concerned primarily with meeting the printing deadlines, can neither ensure quality books, nor quality education. The available data shows that while the gross enrolment rate in Pakistan has reached 87 percent, its net enrolment rate still remains 68 percent, which is way below the regional average of 87 percent for South Asia.
According to the Education Census 2006-07, the literacy rate in Pakistan stands at 53 percent, with a gender gap of 28 percent points. (Male literacy rate is 67 percent while female literacy rate is 39 percent.) Over the past decade or so, the literacy rate in Pakistan has grown by more than 10 percentage points, which has necessitated availability of quality books.
However, the current rate at which the literacy rate is growing in Pakistan is not adequate to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of universal basic education by 2015, as nearly half of the country's population at the moment is still unable to read or write. Despite promises made by successive governments to achieve higher rates of literacy and education, the budgetary allocation for education has in fact gone down from what it was in the 1980s and 1990s. Public expenditure on education, which had averaged 2.5 percent of the country's GDP, has fallen to less than 2 percent since 1998.
The data relating to FY2004-05 shows that an allocation of only $161.1 million or 1.4 percent of the GDP was made for education, as against 201.6 million, or 1.7 percent of the GDP in the 2005 budget. A recent Education for All (EFA) Report has revealed that Pakistan has the highest number of out-of-school children in the world after Niger. Currently, as many as 6.5 million children in Pakistan are out of school. Education bureaucracy should therefore also focus on achieving higher enrolment targets.
Viewed at a larger plane, book trade in Pakistan today is as much driven by the overriding profit motive as any other business. This has restricted access of the public to quality reading material. Secondly, the widening dollar-rupee parity has made imported books prohibitively expensive. Even the books published in India are getting out of financial reach of an average Pakistani reader. The government should try to rein in the publishers' profit motive, because it will in the long run frustrate our endeavour to achieve a knowledge-based economy. The government should conduct a pragmatic review of the country's entire book trade, and make changes where necessary in the larger national interest.