Kathmandu Metropolitan City has issued a press release, warning that schools should not sell books and uniforms and such schools will be punished, if found guilty.

The education officer of the KMC Education Department, Ram Prasad Subedi, informed that schools should not sell books and neither force parents to buy uniforms and books at specific places.

Similarly, the KMC Mayor Balendra Shah, took to Facebook stating that the metropolis has received many complaints that the school is forcing parents to buy books & uniforms from specific places and informed that it is punishable as per the Institutional School Standards and Operating Guidelines, 2013.

As schools force parents to buy books & uniforms from certain places, the parents have bewailed that it has affected the studies of their children.

Sharmila Moktan, mother of a 9th-grade student at a school in Kathmandu said, “My daughter’s school asked us to buy books from a bookstore run by the principal’s relatives. However, the bookstore was not big enough to provide book supplies for the school so we, and many others, just got few books and had to wait for others,”

“After one month of waiting, we thought of buying books from other places and asked for a list of remaining books but neither school nor the bookstore provided us with book lists. So, my daughter asked for pictures of books from her friends and bought books from another bookstore. Some who waited to buy books from the designated bookstore got their books after 2 months.”