School books available before the new academic session this year

HRDD DISPATCHES TEXTBOOKS AND EXERCISE COPIES TO ALL DISTRICT STORES AHEAD OF SCHOOL REOPENING
GANGTOK, 06 Feb: Human Resource Development Department [HRDD] has dispatched school textbooks and exercises copies to all district stores before the schools reopen this year. HRDD has done this in order to ensure that studies begin on time and does not hamper the functioning of the schools.
The schools are reopening on 14 February for its new session.
Addressing a press conference at the HRDD conference hall today, HRDD Secretary, CS Rao, informed that a special request was made to the NCERT and the CBSE by the HRDD and early response from their side resulted in the availability of text books on time.
The Department has already dispatched the textbooks and exercise copies to all the district stores and even 8 schools in North Sikkim, 13 in East Sikkim and 6 in South Sikkim have already procured their textbooks from their respective District stores. Likewise, the HRDD dispatched textbooks and exercise copies to West Sikkim this morning.
There are a total of 779 schools in the state, in which 44 are senior secondary, 107 are secondary, 196 are Junior High Schools and 340 are Primary Schools along with some SSA Schools.
The Secretary informed that there are two term books especially for classes I to V and all subjects are included in a single book and separate language books. The first term book will cover the first half yearly session and the second book will cover the second half yearly session.
“This is being done for the first time in Sikkim just to minimize the burden of the students and even the government is insisting on quality education,” he said. He further informed that from this year onwards most of the contents of the book have also been changed and the department is also planning to organize a three-day special teacher training programme for which the dates will be finalized soon.
The Secretary informed that for classes VI to VIII there will be no term books and separate books are available for which Social Science, Science and Mathematics have been developed by NCERT while English and languages is being developed by SCERT and Language Cell HRDD. NCERT and CBSE have developed the books for Classes IX to XII and the textbooks are being published by the Frank Brothers Publication while the exercise copies are published by the Green Tara publication, Gangtok.
“This time there would not be any delay in providing textbooks, earlier we were using private publishers but this time NCERT and CBSE agreed to print our books and it was an achievement for the department and the state government is bearing the transportation charges to providing these books to its destination,” he informed. He further informed that the government has also approved the school uniforms and within 60 days the uniforms will be ready.
The department is now in a position to supply the textbooks on time for which the Secretary had also expressed his gratitude to the Chief Minister, sister department and the media personnels in rendering their cooperation. The Secretary further stated that sufficient stocks are available and excess requirements made by the Schools will be addressed soon.