Tamil Nadu government releases new school textbooks online, guides already flying off shelves

By- Aarthi Krishnan

CHENNAI: Ahead of the reopening of Tamil Nadu board schools on Friday, the State Council for Educational Research and Training (SCERT) released a soft copy (PDF format) of the textbooks online based on the new syllabus for Classes I, VI, IX and XI on Thursday.
SCERT director G Arivoli said ebooks also would be made available in a few days. “Students and teachers can access this version online till the e-books come out,” he said.
However, a week before the online version released shops had begun selling guide books for Class XI.The first volume of the Class XI text book is being sold in range of ?250 to ?300 in a few shops.
Tamil Nadu Textbook Corporation MD Jagannathan said the e-books as well as hard copies for Classes I, VI and IX would be made available in a day or two, while for Class XI, books would be released in the second week of June. He remarked that several private publishers tend to mislead students by trying to push the versions in the market. “What if the version is not the exact one as that of the government. It seems more like a money spinning mechanism and students should wait for the government versions rather than risk wasting time and money,” he said. Since the new books had not been made available, tuition centres had been unable to start coaching fo Class XI students. School teachers also said they required some time to prepare the new content of the textbooks ahead of the new school year. Publishers seem to have made good use of this gap by releasing the guides at this time.
A bookstore in Adyar said the guides are fast moving. “Volume 1 of the guides has been supplied to us by publishers priced between ?270 and ?300 and many students have bought them,” said the bookshop manager. Guides for subjects such as communicative English, physics, chemistry, commerce and economics are on high demand, he added. It remains a mystery how content was accessed by publishers of guides, before the official release of the books. Sources said that leaked versions of the TN textbooks for Class XI had been circulating on WhatsApp, which were accessed by publications in Tirunelveli, Chennai and Trichy and was used as a reference to release the guidebooks.
The managing director of a publishing firm on condition of anonymity said in the last 10 days, messages in social media were circulated with links to websites containing a downloadable PDF of the textbooks based on the new syllabus. “These links were circulated through educators and publishers. It was bound to reach people through these online portals before the official distribution,” he observed.