Sarkar Fixes Weight of Classroom Satchels

Shakespeare’s ‘whining schoolboy…creeping like snail/Unwillingly to school’, might soon have cause to whoop with delight and turn exuberant cartwheels — at least, if he went to an Indian school. Fearing that the burden of education is proving to be too heavy for young shoulders, the Centre has reportedly directed a cap on the weight of the school bags that students carry.

In order to ‘rationalise’ syllabi by weeding out ‘irrelevant’ or ‘obsolete’ matter, the HRD ministry has set the maximum permissible weight for school satchels at 5 kg for Class X students, going down to 1.5 kg for Classes I and II. To further lighten the load on schoolkids, Classes I and II will be given exemption from homework. As a Rajya Sabha member, novelist R K Narayan had, years ago, famously espoused the cause of cutting down the weight of school satchels.

It seems his exhortation is finally bearing fruit. However, what with subjects, particularly history, constantly being rewritten, students might find that what’s gained on the savings of lighter satchels is lost on the roundabouts of ideological revisionism.


And the parents of schoolchildren will continue to need not satchels but more commodious suitcases to carry the lolly that many institutions demand by way of admission fees. In more ways than one, education in India will remain a heavy industry.