HEAVY SCHOOL BAGS

Recently I saw a cartoon where a father was carrying the school bag of his child in a perambulator stating “it is a nice use after the child has began going to lower KG.
This has been well discussed and said that the weight of the school bag must be reduced. But on the contrary, the same is going bigger and heavier.
Bigger weight of school bag has definitely few advantages. India can win few medals in Olympics weight lifting as the child is getting trained to do so form very beginning. It also makes the child healthy as this provides an automatic exercise every day. But we must do some thing sincerely so that young ones are not put to this agonizing task.
I have few brainwaves. These could reduce the weight of school bags. The ideas can be discussed, modified and suitably tried out.
1 Replace note books by file:
Presently there are separate note books for each subject. Normally a child carries 8-10 note books every day. On average each note book weighs 150 Gms. This makes total weight of note books appox. 1 to 1.5 kg.
In case the suggested file system is introduced, the child need carry only one file having separate leaves for each subject. In house, he can file them subject wise periodically.
It will also save cost of unused pages in the note books which are wasted every year.
For teachers, it will mean less weight carried with them for checking the answers of the students. The parents will also avoid the monotonous task of putting covers on the notebooks every year.
However, every sheet has to be stamped with a rubber stamp showing the name, roll no and other details of the student.
Isn’t this idea novel and revolutionary!
2 Divide and rule for text books
In this section, we shall discuss as how to reduce the weight of text books .Normally the syllabus of each year is divided in unit tests, say four units per year. The syllabus can also be divided in four or six sections.
To reduce the weight of text books, the books for each subject can be broken in four or six sections and one common book for all subjects can be printed for each unit or section.
This mean that there will be one common book for say-English, Hindi, Marathi, History, Geography, Mathematics etc. the books can called by any suitable suffix after the standard e.g. Text Book Standard Eight part 1. part 2 etc.
This suggestion has to be implemented by School Board of each state as the boards are publishing agencies for text books.
The alternative for this could be to print books for each subject unit wise. This means there will 4 or 6 books for English , Hindi etc the books will become thinner and the weight effect will remain as above.
The third alternative for the problem is to print each topic for the subject in separate sheet and all the sheets filed together in subject wise books. The student can pick up the sheets as per the requirement of each day and carry to school.
3 No water bottles in school bags
The parents add one kg, of weight in the school bag as water bottle. To reduce this weight, the schools must provide reliable and safe drinking water. The first step is to provide water filters of reliable quality and then strictly discourage water bottles from home.
Summary
If the authorities think seriously in this regard, definitely some solution can be arrived. The suggestion given here can be further refined to tackle this weight problem. I imagine a child going to school carrying his books on a finger tip in a mall carry bag.
B L DHANDHANIA
Mobile 93256444471