Acting tough on the private schools not adhering to the compulsion of providing National Council of Education Research and Training (NCERT) books to the students while continuing to foist expensive textbooks of private publishers on them, the education department has issued show-cause notices to 181 schools based in four districts of the State.

In the notice, the department has mentioned that these schools have not acted on the Uttarakhand High Court (HC) order on NCERT textbooks while warning such schools of cancelation of the No- Objection Certificate (NOC) issued to them. In the notice, the director general ( DG) of school education, Captain Alok Shekhar Tiwari said that the department had conducted an inquiry on the implementation of HC order  in four districts of the state. The inspection of these schools revealed that the books recommended by the schools are costlier than the NCERT ones. Besides, most of these schools have not uploaded the price list of the textbooks on their website as directed by the court. The inquiry team has found other glaring anomalies in the private schools in these districts, the notice said.  In the show- cause notice, the DG education further said that the department would inform HC about violation of its order and asked ‘Why the NOC issued to your school should not be cancelled?”

The Education Minister Arvind Pandey last year had announced that NCERT books would be compulsorily implemented in all the government and the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE)- affiliated schools of the state. This directive had been challenged by some private schools in the Uttarakhand HC. The HC in its judgement had ordered that the schools could provide books other than NCERT books but their cost should not be more than the NCERT books. The private schools, however, keep flouting the order on the NCERT books. On the orders of the education minister, the department had conducted an inquiry into a large number of prominent private schools of state. Things followed complaints being received from some parents that some schools are forcing them to buy two sets of textbooks, one of NCRT and other of the private publishers.