NCERT officials, however, denied that there have been any delay in printing as well as in distribution of the books. ``Textbooks of Classes X and XII have been reaching the wholesalers since February 15 and there has been no delay on our part while sending them to the market. But there may be some bottlenecks in the process of reaching the retailers. There are two reasons for the confusion and subsequently the shortage -- first, there are certain states which have been given copyright by NCERT to publish textbooks have failed to meet the deadline and students from these states have been collecting the textbooks in bulk from the city retailers. Second, schools which are not affiliated to CBSE also queue up for the NCERT textbooks. To avoid any shortage, we have also increased the print order to 4.98 crore against three crore of last year,'' said P Rajakumar, head, publications, NCERT.

Schools, complain that this is a tedious process. ``Getting the books from the NCERT counters is a time-consuming process,'' said Suraj Prakash, principal, CRPF Public School, which has not received maths and social science textbooks for Class VII and X and environmental sciences and maths for Class II.