VIJAYAWADA: The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) will participate in Frankfurt Book Fair for the first time this year in an attempt to get a toehold in the fiercely competitive world of book publication.

NCERT's publication department head P. Raja Kumar told The Hindu on Monday that the council would participate in the book fair to be held in the industrial and financial capital of Germany from October 4 to 8.

He said there was also a proposal to organise a children's book festival in Bangalore in August second week to coincide with the Independence Day. It would be the first-of-its-kind for the council insofar as conducting a children's book fair was concerned.

Great demand

Mr. Kumar, a native of Vijayawada and an old student of Andhra Loyola College, said that there was a great demand for high quality but low-cost textbooks published by the NCERT.

As a result, the publications department had a print order of three crore textbooks of different subjects in Hindi, English, Urdu and various other national languages.

More than 100 printers around Delhi handle this responsibility for the NCERT.

Mr. Kumar said that the council had replaced the textbooks for classes 1, 3, 6, 9 and 11 with new ones, and also integrated Hindi and English workbooks with textbooks of respective classes.

Textbooks of different subjects from classes 1 to 8 were priced below Rs. 30 and between Rs.30 and Rs.120 for classes from 9 to 12.

Like any other publisher the NCERT, too, was facing piracy problem. The granting of publication rights to States like Haryana and Jharkhand had complicated the issue. Almost all pirated editions get printed on paper of inferior quality but cases were being booked only after establishing the origin of counterfeit textbooks.

Despite the heavy burden of printing textbooks, the council was reprinting other titles that were very popular, Mr. Kumar added.

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