Patiala, June 11
Punjabi may be on top of the agenda of the Akali-led government in the state, but the Punjab State University Textbook Board clearly is not. The board has not been given any funds since 1997 and it is now finding it difficult to stay afloat as it is stuck with unsold books worth crores of rupees in its godowns.

The board is facing a severe resource crunch. It is making both ends meet only through the interest generated from a corpus fund created in 1971, at the time of its creation. While it has a liability of Rs 40 lakh by way of salaries of its employees, it is able to generate only Rs 20 lakh from the sale of books.

The board also has books which have not found any buyers for more than 10 years and are lying dumped in various stores in Patiala and Chandigarh. Books which have cost the board around Rs 2 crore to be produced and are worth much more in the market. They are lying in the godowns. There are 50,000 copies of a single book on the life of Mahatma Gandhi in the stores.

Sources said a large number of books could not be sold as they had been published without any recommendation or used as textbooks, defeating the very purpose of their publication.

Board Director Madan Lal Hasija, who is also Director of the State Language Department, said various steps had been taken since he took over in 1996 to ensure that only textbooks which were saleable were published by the board. The board at present was engaged in publishing science textbooks as well as a dictionary translating English words to Punjabi and books needed by ITI students as well as those taking up vocational courses under the Punjab School Education Board.

Mr Hasija said he was trying to clear the godowns and had put up proposals that the books be sold to various government organisations and libraries. He said books could be sold to village libraries as well as those of the municipal committees and corporations besides various colleges. The board had also proposed that the Punjab School Education Board should allot it Punjabi language books for publication which are to be used by plus one and plus two students.

Sources, however, said these measures, specially the idea to produce books for the school education board may not fructify as it has its own publication wing. They said the genesis of the problem lay in the opening of publication wings by the universities for whom the textbook board was to produce books. They said when the board was established in 1971, it was announced that it would bring out books of Punjabi medium to be used by students for higher studies after Class XI. It was also supposed to publish reference books.

The sources said the work of the textbook board suffered when Punjabi University and others started publishing their textbooks themselves. When the board subsequently went in for reference books, it was not able to sell them as students opted to go for reference books brought out by the universities. They said the role of the board, which had not revised its books frequently to keep pace with changing syllabi, was now further hampered with various private companies also flooding the market with their own reference books rendering it virtually redundant.