After exorbitant admission fee, now buying books and stationery is burning a hole in parents’ pocket. There has been an increase of over 10 per cent in the rates of books, stationery and school bags as compared to last year.
Parents are shelling out nearly Rs 2,500 per child on books. Add to this the cost of stationery items, which have been made compulsory for students, the total cost works out to be nearly Rs 4,000. Even an average school bag is not available for anything less than Rs 800.
With books for most of the schools are available at a handful of booksellers, shopkeepers have not only formed an unwarranted lobby but also left hundreds of parents appalled. The booksellers are extracting money by making packages as they have a tie up with the schools. The schools have made it mandatory to buy syllabus from these recommended book stores.
Many such complaints have been reported to the grievance redressal officer of the capital city DSE (District Superintendent of Police) Jayant Kumar Mishra. DSE said, “Schools like Delhi Public School and little Angles are continuously being reported for such instances. Shortly we will issue show cause notices to them and further if the things does not stop then strict actions will be taken against them.”
There isn’t much difference in the prices of books for junior and senior classes. The English books for Class II and Class VIII are available in the range of Rs 200 to Rs 250. A parent, Veenita Singh, said that she failed to understand how the prices of books for junior and senior classes could be the same.
For the past one week, a huge rush of parents can be seen scrambling for books in a handful of bookstores like Prem Pustakalaya and Pustak Mandir. Such stores are strangely catering a number of schools across the city. They have already prepared school-wise ready-to-take packets to avoid any confusion. Some of them even have school names written in front of their shops. Private schools are claiming that they have displayed the list of books on the notice board and parents are allowed to buy them from anywhere.
St. Mary’s (N) School is providing syllabus along with stationeries and accessories to the kids which starts from Rs.1200 to Rs. 2, 2500. Parents are complaining against being allegedly forced by schools to buy a range of stationery items even before the beginning of the session. A parent, Anjali Verma, said last year also, many stationery items remained unused throughout the year. “The schools should not burden parents by asking them to buy articles which are not immediately required,” she said. A parent said the stationery list, including oil pastel colours, art and craft material and pencils, was costing them more than Rs 1,000 alone.
Many parents said that the budget had increased massively, especially after schools started prescribing books by private publishers, who revise their prices every year. There is a huge difference between the rates of books of private publishes and those of NCERT books.
A local book distributor, while agreeing that books of private publishers were costlier, said given the colourful format and better pages these books had, it was not possible to sell these in the subsidised NCERT price range.