KOCHI: More than five years after the government accepted the State Human Rights Commission's recommendations on the regulation of weight of school bags, they fail to be implemented in most schools, especially the CBSE ones. Practical difficulties, coupled with the fact that both parents and schools refuse to take the situation seriously enough, are being cited as the major hindrance in the implementation of the scheme.The recommendation for the reduction of weight of school bags was based on a study conducted by the ICPA New Zealand. It pointed out that students who carry school bags weighing more than 10 per cent of their weight, for a period of 10 years, can have a permanent bent of 15 degrees in their spine. "Once they are out of schools, the growing up phase is almost over, making the bent permanent”, says Mukesh Jain, the petitioner of the case.As per the recommendations, the text books were supposed to be divided into three parts for the quarterly, half-yearly and annually. Thus bringing down the weight of texts to one-third. In order to reduce the weight of the notebooks, 100 page books for children upto VIIth standard and filing system for children from the VIIIth were recommended. Apart from this, reducing the weight of the empty school bag to 250 grams from the existing average of 750 grams was the other important recommendation.The state government accepted the recommendation in totem and all the text books were published in volumes. But this encountered some problems, for instance the government school syllabus was modified to a two term syllabus. Thus only two volumes instead of three was published. More importantly CBSE schools, which do not get the benefit of state government published books, were left out of its ambit. Even though several private publishers too agreed to print the text books in parts, the decision to buy them was left to the parents and schools. "We have asked students and parents to use notebooks which are 100-150 pages. But as of now there are no mechanisms to check this,", says the Deputy Director of Eduction, M D Murali.Practical difficulty is cited as another difficulty. “We had experimented on that four years back, but it came with practical difficulties with students missing papers etc. Apart from this, during periodical tests and weighing of the bags, we find students carrying books and diaries unnecessarily. Some do not follow time tables and carry extra books. These things can be avoided only if there is an active participation between parents and teachers, said the Principal of Chinmaya Vidyalaya, Vaduthala, P Maya mohan.
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