Words ‘markup’ and ‘interest’ to be taken out of Math books

The Textbook Publishers Association (TPA) on Thursday demanded the government to direct the Punjab Curriculum and Textbook Board (PCTB) to issue them no objection certificate (NOC) and withdraw the “heavy fee” for publishing textbooks under the Single National Curriculum (SNC), claiming it will push the book prices up further.

TPA President Fawaz Niaz said PCTB had imposed a heavy fee for reviewing textbooks published under the SNC that would result in increasing the books cost up to 300 per cent, according to a report published in Dawn.

“The publishers will pay Rs45,000 to the Mutahidda Ulema Board (MUB), Rs80,000 to external review committees, and Rs15,000 to the PCTB for issuance of the NOC,” said Fawaz.

Fawaz said the PCTB had also formed a committee of the MUB to review every book, including those of science and mathematics.

“The members of the MUB committee have issued a direction that the words ‘interest’, ‘markup’ be eliminated from the mathematics textbooks,” Niaz said.

Niaz also said some of the religious scholars, who were members of the committee, also directed the publishers not to print any sketches or diagrams in the biology textbooks showing human figures.

Questioning separate mechanisms in the provinces for introduction of the new curriculum, he mentioned there would be no SNC in Sindh and Balochistan, while in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa the NOC from the MUB was not required, as the job of monitoring the syllabus from Islamic perspective was assigned to subject specialists, unlike Punjab.