HYDERABAD: Even as lakhs of students have been waiting for nationalised textbooks, termites and rodents have nibbled at thousands of them, which have remained undistributed in godowns across Andhra Pradesh in the past few years.

Apathy

Thanks to apathy of the Government Textbook Press and Education Department officials, the wasteful expenditure on account of lakhs of books lying idle in godowns in several districts and the city is Rs.9.5 crore, a recent investigation by Vigilance and Enforcement sleuths revealed. Official sources told The Hindu that the probe into `indiscriminate printing, storage and distribution of textbooks', had brought out some interesting facts — 6,157 Oriya books were sent by the press to the sales depot in West Godavari district without any indent from the District Educational Officer.

The Nellore DEO placed an indent for 9,126 Tamil, 2,202 Urdu and 725 Hindi textbooks between 1994 and 2000 although these languages were not taught there. A whopping 7.4 lakh books were indented in excess of the requirement in Krishna district. In many instances tens of thousands of books were obsolete following changes in the syllabi. Among the 12 districts apart from the city, where investigations were conducted, the highest loss of Rs. 2.7 crore was detected in Warangal.

This was followed by losses of Rs.1.8 crore in Nizamabad, Rs.1.76 crore in Khammam and Rs.1.01 crore in the twin cities. The other instances of negligence include 57,788 textbooks worth Rs.4.41 lakh remaining undistributed in Guntur, many in Hindi, though there are no Hindi-medium schools in the district.

Excess indents

At many places DEOs violated orders in issuing the notification and allotting tender to contractors for transportation of textbooks during 2005-06. No proper records of receipts and issuance were maintained by MEOs.

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