Uncertainty looms if the National Curriculum and Textbook Board will be able to distribute all textbooks among all students on the first day of 2026, following the government’s recent cancellation of a tender for printing 12.61 crore books.
Despite the fear, Secondary and Higher Education Division secretary Rehana Parveen and the NCTB chair Robiul Kabir Chowdhury are optimistic about distributing all books to all students on January 1, 2026.
After deciding to repeat the tender process for printing textbooks of Classes VI to VIII, the board deferred its earlier target for completing all printing from November 30 to December 15.
NCTB officials said that they were working to complete printing all books as per the second target by reducing the time for completing the re-tender and other relevant processes. It usually takes five months from calling tenders to complete the printing of textbooks.
Currently, the board, under the education ministry, is mandated to formulate, develop, renew, monitor and reform the curriculum, syllabus and textbooks, and print, publish, distribute and market textbooks for the pre-primary to secondary level students.
The government has been distributing free textbooks for the pre-primary to secondary level students since 2010 through the board.
The board faced huge criticism earlier this year for failing to provide free textbooks to all primary and secondary level students.
After much delay, all students got textbooks by March, three months after their classes started.Â
Following this, the board decided to start the initiatives of printing textbooks for the next year early this year and set a target to print around 30.02 crore books by November 30 this year.
According to the NCTB, the board is scheduled to print 60.67 lakh pre-primary, 7.90 crore Class I-V, 1.85 lakh ethnic minority groups, 6.43 lakh additional pre-primary (4+), 12.61 crore Class VI-VIII, 5.7 crore Class IX-X, 3.11 crore Ibtedayi, and 6,026 Braille method textbooks this year.
The board has already completed tender processes for printing all these textbooks.
The cabinet committee on government purchases, in a meeting in August, cancelled the tender for printing 12.61 crore textbooks for Classes VI-VIII. The committee, however, did not show any reason for the cancellation, the board officials said.
A senior board official said that, after the cancellation, the board started the re-tender process last week and was trying to work fast, as it usually took five months to complete the overall process of printing textbooks after calling a tender.
‘Let us assume that it takes 28 days to complete the contract but we will try to reduce the time to one week,’ he said, and added that it usually took around 190 days for evaluation of the tender and the time might be reduced to three or four days.
In this way, he added, they would try to reduce the number of days to catch the target of December 15 to print all textbooks.
Secondary and Higher Education Division secretary Rehana Parveen said that they had planned to distribute all textbooks among all students on January 1, 2026.  Â
The board chairman, professor Robiul Kabir Chowdhury, also said that all students would definitely get all textbooks on January 1 next year.
According to the board, dummy works before final printing of the textbooks for pre-primary to primary levels are currently going on and all books of these levels will be printed by October.
By the end of this September, the textbooks for the Classes of IX-X will go to the press for printing, they said.
At the beginning of this year, according to the NCTB, the government distributed 40.15 crore copies of textbooks among about four crore students across the country.
The government, however, set a target to print around 30.02 crore textbooks, about 10 crore less than those distributed early this year, to distribute among all the students on the first day of the next year, they said.
The targeted number of textbooks this time has lessened as the demand for the books has been strictly monitored, the officials said.
After the ouster of the Sheikh Hasina-led Awami League regime on August 5, 2024, the interim government decided to print the textbooks for this year as per the 2012 curriculum, overturning the ousted regime’s decision to follow the 2021 curriculum.
Following the government decision, the board cancelled the previous tenders, launched an evaluation of the textbooks as per the 2012 national curriculum and floated fresh tenders for printing the textbooks.
Some of the printers said that they received work orders even in December 2024, which was supposed to come by August, as was the usual case in previous years.
Education adviser professor Chowdhury Rafiqul Abrar, at a special meeting held at the NCTB Bhaban on June 25, affirmed the government’s commitment to delivering accurate and error-free textbooks to students on January 1, 2026, correcting past mistakes and ensuring improved content quality across all grades.