BENGALURU: A meeting of the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE), scheduled on Wednesday, is expected to form a new rule to make the school bags of primary and secondary schoolchildren, lighter. The decision would involve directing the school managements to make appropriate arrangements to lighten the loads of all bag-carrying students till Std II.
If this proposal is accepted, all the schools must make separate arrangements to keep the bags of the children studying in the LKG, UKG, Std I and II, inside the classroom. According to the agenda of the meeting, which has already been given to the members, even after a number of mechanisms adopted by the various government agencies, MHRD is still receiving representations from the various stakeholders over the increasing weight of school bags. As a remedy to this problem, now the MHRD has proposed five new guidelines.
One of the guidelines is to create the necessary infrastructure inside the classroom to store the bags of the children to make sure that they need not carry them home every day. The other four guidelines are: requesting the parents of all the students to buy child-friendly bags which are comfortable to use and light in weight. It is also proposed to discourage students from bringing heavy reference books and other books to school.
In a bid to help students who can’ t carry textbooks to schools, MHRD proposed setting up classroom libraries in all the schools. It also proposed to issue directions to school principals and teachers to prepare a well-structured time-table to ensure that students need not bring all their text and other books to school every day.
Textbooks: Karnataka leads the way
According to the MHRD officials, as per the Karnataka, students between Std I and IV, need to carry only three books. Students between Std V and VIII need to carry only four books. “These are the least number of books in the country. In Haryana state, a Std VIII student needs to carry 16 books as per the data submitted by the state government,” said an officer.
But the headmaster of a private school in the city said even in the city, the situation is not different. “Even though the government has fixed three books, students must carry 6-7 books. It is not easy to implement any decision taken by the MHRD in this regard,” he concluded.
