Textbook shortage, price hike strain parents

With the onset of the new session, there has been a lot of rush observed in Urdu bazaars and book-stores, besides book cover shops. The price of protective covers has also gone up this year.

At residential areas, educated female students, housewives, and working women are providing book-covering services on part-time basis to meet kitchen expenses.

There are now boards showing book-covering services provided, besides women doing part-time job by way of taking orders for book-covering services from commercial cover shops.

The charges for applying X-Ray plastic cover to a book vary from Rs 75 to Rs 100. Large notebooks and registers are charged from Rs 120 to Rs 130. One can complete the whole process of book-covering in about three to four hours.

However, increasing paper rates have made all kinds of notebooks, registers, textbooks, drawing books, practical copies and stationery articles costly this year. Small size notebook costs Rs 150, middle sized Rs 250, while high quality notebook goes for Rs 400. Registers cost Rs 450, while drawing book costs Rs 1,000 and practical copies cost from Rs 2,700 to Rs 3,000.

The costs associated with school have also risen dramatically, with uniforms costing around Rs3,000; school shoes ranging from Rs2,500-Rs5,000; and school bags starting from Rs1,500 (for very cheap ones) and reaching up to Rs3,000-Rs5,000 for good quality school bags.

Admission fee rates differ from institution to institution; however, the amount it takes to admit one child (considering the first month fee, textbooks, note-books, school uniform, shoes and school bag), amounts to somewhere between Rs20,000 and Rs30,000.

Moreover, there is a shortage of forty percent in the supply of books for this year. Many parents have protested against this increase in prices.

Parents stated that free education and healthcare are provided in many parts of the world, where talent arises from it. Whereas in Pakistan both have been made progressively inaccessible for the poor.