Press briefing of Cabinet Decision taken on 2016-10-25

Implementation of a Pilot Project for Printing Text books on durable Synthetic Paper

- The Government incurs an expenditure of around Rs.3,500 million annually, to provide text books free of charge. Although, programmes for increasing the re-use of text books was implemented by the Educational Publications Department, it is found that a text book cannot be used for more than 03 years. As such, 70% of the text books have to be reprinted for distribution and an exorbitant expenditure has to be incurred for the purpose. Accordingly, the proposal made by Hon. Akila Viraj Kariyawasam, the Minister of Education, to implement a pilot project in the year 2017, for printing a different-types of the text books using synthetic paper with a high quality finish, which could be used by the students with ease and which do not get damaged due to natural disasters and where the pen and pencil marks could be removed easily, was approved by the Cabinet.