HOLDING a piece of white paper in her left hand and clutching her 10-year-old daughter’s thin wrist with the other, Urmila Semwal, a vegetable vendor, went to a bookshop in Dehradun’s popular Paltan Bazaar to buy textbooks. Her daughter, Kamla, had just secured admission into Class 6 in the local government senior secondary school. Urmila was looking for inexpensive NCERT textbooks for maths and science.
She got a rude shock when the shopkeeper handed her an entire set of books, by a private publisher, of all the subjects and told her she would have. . .
