The education adviser, Wahiduddin Mahmud, on Wednesday expressed regrets to students and their guardians for not distributing all free textbooks on the first day of this year.
At the inauguration of the online version of the textbooks and the distribution of monthly payment orders to non-government teachers, he blamed conspiracies for the failure.
鈥業t is unbelievable from how many sides we have faced conspiracies against the distribution of textbooks on the forest day of the year,鈥� he told the programme held at the International Mother Language Institute in the capital.
Wahiduddin said that it was almost a warlike situation to print the textbooks as they got a short time for the printing of the textbooks due to changes of the curriculum, review of the textbooks and changes in the NCTB.
National Curriculum and Textbook Board chairman AKM Reazul Hassan at the programme said that they sent 6 crore of the 41 crore copies of the textbooks to upazilas till Tuesday for distribution.
鈥楢round 4 crore more books are waiting to be loaded on trucks and these may be sent by today,鈥� he said.
He added that they would distribute the rest of the primary textbooks by January 5, eight more secondary-level textbooks by January 10 and the rest of the textbooks by January 20.
Siddique Zobair, senior secretary to the Secondary and Higher Education Division under the education ministry, however, promised at the programme that all textbooks would be sent across the country by January 30.
On the first day of the textbook distribution, the NCTB had to bring about a correction to a Class V textbook that had read the name of a July martyr as Nahiyan instead of Nafisa.聽
The NCTB corrected the name in its online version, said Reazul Hassan.聽聽
This year, according to the NCTB, 40.15 crore copies of textbooks鈥撯��62 lakh for pre-primary, 8.55 crore for primary and 30.81 crore for secondary students鈥攚ill be distributed among about four crore pre-primary, primary, secondary, secondary vocational, ibtedayi, dakhil vocational, national minority and visually challenged students.
Besides, 1.92 lakh copies of textbooks will be distributed among the students from five national minority communities.
At Nilkhet High School, the teachers were seen distributing a full set of textbooks to the students of pre-primary to Class III and three books鈥撯�揃angla, English and mathematics subjects鈥撯�� to the students of Class VIII and IX.
The teachers said that they did not get textbooks for other classes yet.聽
The same situation was seen at Udayan Higher Secondary School and Nilkhet Government Primary School.
Teachers at these schools said that they would teach the students by downloading the textbooks from the NCTB website.聽
Students, including Ahnaf Rahman, Dipayan Halder and Md Omar, said that though they did not get all the textbooks, they were still happy to start a new class.聽
NCTB chairman Reazul Hassan told the programme that following the decision of returning to the 2012 curriculum, the board reviewed 441 books in two months and a half.
For the Class X students, this year for an extra 6.79 crore new books were being printed for going back to the previous curriculum which also raised the cost, he continued.
