No textbooks for international students; new school year begins this month

A shortage of textbooks in the market is leaving international school students in the lurch as the new school year begins. This will be the second time the new school year begins online for these students.

With the beginning of the school year and the progression of students into their new grades, parents complained that textbooks required for their children are not to be found in the market.

“My son is starting his Ordinary Level studies this year but we have not been able to find quite a few of his required textbooks yet,” said one parent of an international school student.

“The books are his core texts for his next two years of study. Online education is not successful, and depending on online classes without a textbook to refer to will be quite impractical for exam preparation,” she said.

While many imports were banned over the course of the pandemic, books, though not necessarily considered essential items, fell into a gray area of products that were still allowed into the country.

“However, pandemic related delays severely affected our supply chains,” said Dinusha Abeywirckrama, President of the Ceylon Booksellers, Importers and Exporters Association.

“Book imports from India would first travel from Delhi to Chennai and then come down to Sri Lanka. However, these had been completely cut off as the COVID-19 situation in India exacerbated over the last year. While the situation was improving, the back l o g had been immense.”

“Another issue was the fact that most offices are closed and the staff is working from home, so when we contact our suppliers in countries like the UK it takes a long period of time to get through, if at all,” she said.

However, even where the chains of supply were clear, relationships between suppliers abroad and bookshops here were strained. Many bookstores told the Sunday Times that the system as it stood consisted of credit based stock purchases.

Credit periods for stocks imported would vary between 30-90 days based on the relevant contracts that the bookshops had with their suppliers. However, with the stalls in the local banking system a backlog of unpaid invoices had occurred.