PAPER CRISIS: EDUCATIONAL FUTURE OF CHILD IN DANGER!

Paper as a commodity has always been a vital aspect of our country's educational system. The education system was particularly hard hit by the COVID Pandemic, with each stakeholder being negatively affected by the onslaught of regular lockdowns. With the schools closing down, our student community, the future of our country, faced a bleak period of uncertainty. Textbooks and printed educational material, which had traditionally been the backbone of our learning methodology, were particularly disrupted with the advent of online methods of teaching and learning. But it is clear that the offline education system and classroom teaching hold much more importance than online teaching methods.

Thanks to NEP 2020 and various measures to speed up growth-based education in India. The trends have started in a positive mode, but the reality is that the use of paper in the shape of textbooks, notebooks, and stationery plays an important role in the whole existence, maintenance, and growth of the education system in India. A shortage in paper availability in India and a sharp rise in paper prices in the past months have projected a situation in which the school education system has now begun to get somewhat suffocated.

It is important to give an overview of the school education system in order to properly summarise the serious situation that is presented to us. There are currently approximately 15 lakhs schools in India. These are mainly run at the Central, State and Local levels. National Boards like CBSE and CISCE have only about 25000 and 2600 affiliated schools, respectively. This means that the largest student population in India are associated with the schools, run by state governments and local administrative bodies. The whole structure of education in India is still heavily dependent on paper. In the past few months, there has been a heavy paper shortage in the educational industry, which has led to a rapid rise in the prices of paper in India. If the paper becomes unavailable, the education system comes to a standstill. Similarly, if books, notebooks and stationery become unaffordable, the education system also gets defeated. This situation has become more and more severe day by day, and it has begun to eat up the vitality of the education system in India. This, in turn, puts the economy's growth and human resources terribly at stake in the country.

The Government of India, the State Governments, and the voluntary organisations involved in education must take immediate cognisance of this future crisis of paper shortage and skyrocketing paper prices in India and make all-around efforts to control this problem.