Balbharati to use organic waste to print textbooks
Paper made from wheat and sugarcane by products will now be used for printing Balbharati textbooks. The Maharashtra State Bureau of Textbook Production, popularly known as Balbharati, has decided to use paper made out of agricultural waste products to print over 10 crore state school textbooks from the 2017-18 academic year.
The bureau will scrap the present system of using wood base paper made of out of tree pulp. A professor from Nagpur, Arvind Sovani, had filed a petition in the high court in October, stating that the pulp paper used by Balbharati to publish textbooks was not eco-friendly and that they should opt for greener ways. In November, the court had ordered Balbharati to stop the tender process for pulp paper and issue a fresh one for environment-friendly sheets.
Based on this order, Balbharati has decided to use agricultural waste-based pulp to make paper for printing textbooks.Sunil Magar, director of Balbharati, said, “We have issued an all-India tender to procure pa per made out of agro waste.“
Magar said the bureau requires 30,000 tones of paper per year to print the textbooks. “We will be using paper made out of agricultural byproducts like wheat and sugarcane waste from the next academic year itself,“ he added. Currently, Balbharti prints books in eight languages--Marathi, English, Hindi, Urdu, Kannada, Telugu, Sindhi and Gujarati.
Until now, Balbharati had been using “virgin pulp paper“ for printing textbooks and Sovani, in his petition, had said that this paper was hazardous to the environment as it required cutting of trees. Considering the number of textbooks printed every year by Balbharati and the virgin paper used for printing, there was a lot of damage done to environment, Sovani had said in his petition.
Source | Times of India | 3 January 2017
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