Thiruvananthapuram | Kerala General Education Minister V Sivankutty on Thursday said preparations for the 2026-27 academic year were complete even before the schools close, with 68 lakh textbooks already printed.
The minister, in a social media post, said that around 3.5 crore textbooks will be printed for the first volume of the upcoming academic year and of these 68 lakh were ready.
Sivankutty, in a statement, further said that indenting of textbooks for the academic year 2026-27 was completed in the first week of December 2025 and printing orders were issued to KBPS by the last week of that month.
The administrative approval for Rs 111 crore to purchase paper for the printing of the books was granted in September last year, he added.
Besides taking steps to distribute the books before closure of the schools in this academic year, the government was also working to distribute free handloom uniforms to more than eight lakh children, the minister said.
He said that the state-level distribution of textbooks and uniforms will be inaugurated on February 13 by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan at St. Mary's School, here.
He also said that the schedule for the Secondary School Leaving Certificate (SSLC), Technical High School Leaving Certificate Examination (THSLC) and Art High School Leaving Certificate (AHSLC) exams in the state has already been fixed with the public exams set to commence from March 5.
Since this year's exams are based on new textbooks, there were deliberate attempts from some quarters to create apprehensions in the minds of students, he said.
He termed such attempts as "completely baseless".
The model question papers were published on the State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) website at the beginning of the academic year and these new questions were introduced to the children in the Onam and Christmas exams, he said.
Special programmes have also been started through the Kite Victors channel to introduce the new question papers to students, he added.
