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Textbook board's dissolution opposed
PESHAWAR, March 22(Dawn): The Frontier Printers and Publishers Association on
Wednesday staged a demonstration in protest against the proposed dissolution of
the Textbook Board, which provides textbooks on subsidised prices to the
students in the public sector all over the province, and revival of the old
system of private publishers.
The protesters at the demonstration held
outside the Peshawar Press Club said the new policy confined the right of
education to the affluent segments by making it expensive.
Speaking on
the occasion, a leader of the publishers, Mohammad Tayyab, said the private
publishers were responsible to provide the textbooks to the students from 1947
to 1962 but they had failed to cater to their needs. In 1962, he said, the
government of Gen Ayub Khan had constituted a commission to look into the system
and on its recommendations set up textbook boards to provide the books at lower
prices to the students.
He said the boards hired the services of printers
and publishers to meet their targets at the beginning of every academic
year.
They had been providing books to the students for the past 45 years
satisfactorily but now some agents of multinational companies were conspiring to
destroy the educational base of the country by replacing the boards with the
private publishing houses, he said. He said their livelihood was linked to the
boards.
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