With the start of the new academic session, the parents of the private school students are finding themselves entangled in the bookseller-school nexus. To add to their woes, the prices of textbooks this year have increased by 15-18 per cent. Dehradun which is famous for its schools in the country has about 165 private schools in the city alone. It is an open secret that most of these school owners enter into a nexus with the publishing houses and booksellers to earn a hefty commission in total sales of textbooks and other stationery.
Most of these schools do not prefer to prescribe the textbooks of the National Council of Education Research and Training (NCERT) as there is no chance of getting commission from there. This correspondent visited some bookshops of the city on Wednesday, it was learnt that the bookshop owners having tie up with the schools do a roaring business while the one not doing so suffer due to low sales. On Tuesday, the students belonging to DAV College Students Union barged into Doon International School and stopped sale of books and stationery in the school campus.
The Chairman of the school later told The Pioneer that the school has nothing to do with the bookseller and it has merely allowed him to open a shop in the campus to facilitate the parents (a point hard to digest by any means). A prominent bookseller said the school owners demand a commission in the range of 35-45 per cent of total sales. He revealed that some of the big schools directly enter into a deal with the publishing houses and there is big competition among these houses to strike deal with the prominent schools.
After finalising deal with the publishing house, the school management enters into an understanding with the bookshop owners and allows only those shops to sell their books which offer maximum cut to them. In this way, the school owners get a double benefit as they earn easy money from both the publishers and the bookshop owners. The only sufferers in this game of commissions are ‘poor’ parents of the students who have to pay a very high price for the books. This nexus ensures that a textbook set of Class V-VII cost in a range of Rs3500-5000 while the NCERT books hardly cost Rs45-60 per book, which clearly indicates the extent of this open loot. MS Bhandari, a retired school Principal said the Government should make it compulsory for the schools to use only the textbooks offered by NCERT as they are cheap and much better in content and paper quality. Raghav Saluja owner of Saluja Book store located on Rajpur road informed that there is a problem of availability of NCERT textbooks.