New Delhi: AAP Friday alleged corruption in printing textbooks that are given for free to Delhi govt school students, alleging that “BJP govt has pocketed 40% commission.”Delhi BJP dismissed the charge as “baseless”. “AAP’s govt in Punjab is disintegrating, that is why AAP is leveling allegations against BJP govt in Delhi to offset its own failures. This pattern of allegations would continue until the Punjab elections,” Delhi BJP spokesperson Praveen Shankar Kapoor said.During a news conference, an AAP functionary showed two Hindi textbooks of Class VIII comparing the one purchased from the open market which was of “better quality” as compared with the one that govt has got printed through a tender.The functionary alleged that the books distributed by govt were also “much smaller” in size and the pages ” grey” and the “paper used and the printing quality is so bad of the govt textbooks that the text is hardly readable.”“The tender for a Class VIII NCERT book, Malhar, specified 80 GSM paper, but the printed books used inferior quality paper and extremely small print. In the market, books with better paper quality and larger print size are available for Rs 65, which includes commissions from shopkeepers to distributors. Meanwhile, by providing inferior-quality books to children in govt schools, education minister Ashish Sood and BJP govt are pocketing a 40% commission,” the AAP functionary said.AAP alleged that textbooks printed by the education department violated tender specifications, using grey, 60 GSM paper, instead of the prescribed white, 80 GSM A4 paper.Education minister Sood’s office said it would hold a news conference Saturday to address these questions with evidence-based responses.“During Kejriwal’s 11-year rule in Delhi, school textbooks were rarely provided to the students. Entire academic sessions would pass, yet govt would fail to provide books. Therefore, now that textbooks have been supplied regularly for the past two years, they see a scam in that as well,” Kapoor said. He asked if the AAP functionary was capable of judging the quality of the textbook paper.
