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Coming April, parents will no longer have to stand in long queues to purchase textbooks. They would be able to order books online from the Balbharati portal.

Parents can either get textbooks from the Balbharati depots across the state or get them delivered home. Balbharati publishes Maharashtra state syllabus textbooks for classes 1 to 12. Nearly 13 crore textbooks have been published for the academic year 2016-17, said officials.

Yogesh Limaye, head, Balbharati's computer section said, "The department has been trying to digitize all procedures. We have already uploaded pdf versions of textbooks and workbooks to the official website, which people can just download. We now decided to sell textbooks online."

Balbharati has book depots in Pune, Mumbai, Panvel, Goregaon, Nashik, Amravati, Nagpur, Latur, Kolhapur and Aurangabad. According to Limaye, the move will help local vendors the most. "Earlier, vendors had to come to the book depots, get the challan for books, go to a bank and pay the amount, submit the receipt and then get an invoice after which they would get the exact weight of their books. Based on this, they had to call a vehicle. Now the entire process will be online," said Limaye.

Limaye added that they will have to see how individual buyers respond to the facility. He said the postal department's service will be used to deliver the books. "Nominal postal charges will be charged along with the textbook's price. Typically, a textbook costs between Rs 10 and Rs 90," said Limaye.

Balbharati's director Chandramani Borkar said, "Other than textbooks, we also produce teachers' handbooks, workbooks and extra reading material. Currently, only the sale of textbooks will go online but after gauging the response, our committee will decide whether to include other books".

While this year Balbharati has printed about 13 crore textbooks, last year the number was around 16 crore and the year before that 19 crore. Borkar, however, said this does not indicate any decrease in students' response to state syllabus or migration to other boards.

Printing of textbooks increases every time new books are introduced. During the subsequent years, the production goes down as many students buy second-hand texts from seniors. This year, only Class 6 textbooks have been changed as per the revised curriculum whereas two years ago, three classes had new curricula, so the number of textbooks had gone higher."