Delay in the supply of printing paper, coupled with long power cuts and fuel shortage, means the Janak Shiksha Samagri Kendra (JSSK) is set to miss another printing deadline for school-level textbooks.

With the new academic session just four months away, the state-funded publication house has hardly printed a fourth of its target of 18 million units for the current academic session.

Three months into the publication, the JSSK has readied 5 million units,

of which more than half included the stock from the last year. It is the sole publication house authorised to print the textbooks for the secondary level.

While around two dozen private publication houses print the textbooks for grade 1-5, the JSSK publishes books for grade 6-10.

The JSSK management puts the blame for the sluggish progress on the

delay in supply of printing paper. The supplier has so far delivered just 10

percent of the total 5,000 tonnes of paper needed for the current year. The blockade and fuel shortage are other contributing factors with the paper being

imported from India after long time as the domestic supplier could not meet

the bid criteria, according to the JSSK.

JSSK Chief Executive Anil Jha, however, claimed that there had been improvement in the supply of paper and all the press would be used full fledged for the publication within a week.

Thanks to a separate feeder, the publication house now experiences power outage for less than four hours a day and it has ample fuel in stock to run generators.

“We hope to increase the print volume to 120,000 units a head from around 90,000 at present,” he said. The government has been providing free textbooks to some 7.1 million students from 29,000 public schools in the country.