Now, II PU Arts and Commerce will get government textbooks

Karnataka state government has decided to provide government textbooks to the students of II PU Arts and Commerce, from next academic year. Until now, the government only prescribed the syllabus, but not textbooks. The new textbooks would be compiled by the end of January.

This year, the Department of Pre-University Education (DPUE) has prescribed textbooks for I PU. Earlier the whole structure was different, students use to refer to books by various author while the job of DPUE was to provide only the syllabus. "The DPUE will be prescribing textbooks for arts and commerce courses for the first time," says the DPUE Assistant Director, Ashok Kumar.

30 subjects will have new textbooks, including 11 languages. These textbooks will be designed as per the National Curriculum Framework (NCF), 2005. In order to cater students of both the media, DPUE will publish these text books in Kannada as well as in English.

The government has hired 10 experts for compiling each textbook. These experts have been working since August 2013 and are finalising the chapters at present.

After the experts put their final stamp on the textbooks' material, the DPUE will invite tenders for printing the textbooks.

Last year, the students of science stream were asked by the government to refer to NCERT textbooks. The main reason behind this step was to make the state students come head to head with their CBSE peers. There was a slight change for commerce and arts students."The idea is to bring it on a par with the CBSE syllabus, no doubt. But we will not straightaway take it from the NCERT. We are designing our own syllabus that will be of an equal standard," Kumar added.