Italian and Indian printing houses that published poor-quality school textbooks for Kyrgyzstan refuse to pay a fine. Report of Bulan Institute says.
At least 33 types of textbooks with a total circulation of 3,330 million copies were published at the expense of the World Bank’s money.
More than 80 percent of them were printed abroad — in the printing houses of India Pitambra Books, Vietnam Hanoi Printing and Italy Grafica Veneta S.p.a. Only three textbooks (geography, history and environmental studies) were printed in Kyrgyzstan, gross errors were made in two of them.
«Errors were also found in books published abroad. The Ministry of Education sent teachers a special video instruction in which it instructed to stick an additional sheet indicating errors at the end of the books. Foreign printing houses, despite the fact that they received orders on behalf of the government of another state, failed to perform their work at a professional level and did not meet the deadlines. Students had no books for a year,» the study notes.
According to the Ministry of Education, fines were imposed on Italian and Indian printing houses that violated the requirements specified in the contract. However, at present, both printing houses completely refuse to pay the fines.
