Children trudging to school carrying heavy bags like beasts of burden is a common and perturbing sight in the city. The state government has finally decided to give them relief by lightening their load from the next academic year.
The commissioner and director of school education, Ms Poonam Malakondaiah, said that the government was committed to introduce reforms to reduce the load of the school bag.
"We have already taken a decision on reducing the weight of textbooks from next year," she said. "Currently, there are 155 titles pertaining to textbooks from Class VI to X. They will be brought down to 117 through merging several of them."
The size of textbooks will also be reduced to A4 size. This will bring down the weight of the school bags considerably. "Printing of new textbooks in A-4 size will begin in November and will be completed by February," said Ms Malakondaiah.
At present, children have to carry different books for the same subject. But from now on, all the books will merge unto one and `unnecessary topics' will be deleted. But experts feel that these measures are not enough to bring down the health problems caused by overweight school bags. An average school-day consists of eight `periods,' each for different subjects. For each subject, the child has to carry a textbook and several notebooks. Add to this the lunch boxes, water bottles and sports equipment and the school bag becomes a pile.
It is no wonder that so many school children complain of aching backs and shoulders. "We have to do more to reduce the load," said Prof. Nageshwar of Osmania University. "Several private schools urge kids to buy additional books apart from those prescribed by the government and boards. When I recently went to a book shop and asked for an SCERT text, I was immediately offered a whole range of workbooks, which were double the price of the textbook."
On average each notebook weighs 150 grams. This makes the total weight of notebooks approximately 1.5 kg. Together, the textbooks usually weigh about 3 kg. Experts have made various suggestions to give relief to the children. Some want schools to introduce a `file system' under which the child needs to carry only one file having separate leaves for each subject.
At home, the child can file them subjectwise periodically. It will also save the cost of unused pages in the notebooks. Academics have been urging schools to provide lockers to children so that they don't have to carry sports equipment and other books regularly to home.
Some have also suggested that students buy two sets of text books and kept one set both at school and home. But this won't be a feasible option for middle-income groups.
Others want the textbooks to be divided into units. "Normally the syllabus of each year is divided in unit tests or four units per year," said Mr Narasimha Rao, principal of the Oxford Public School. "To reduce the weight, the books for each subject can be broken in four or six sections and one common book for all subjects can be printed for each unit or section."