Education minister Partha Chatterjee said on Tuesday that the state government would initiate “appropriate measures” to make schoolbags lighter after studying the set of guidelines issued by Delhi.

“I will have to discuss the matter in detail with the chief minister. The school education department will examine the recommendations once it receives them. Our government is opposed to children being burdened with heavy schoolbags. This is a serious issue and we have been working on having a proper policy on this,” the minister said.

According to an official, the government is already trying to ensure that students in classes I to II across state-funded schools are not given any homework, as recommended by the Union ministry of human resource development.

The state government will find out from the ministry whether the onus of monitoring the weight of schoolbags carried by students of ICSE and CBSE schools is also on the school education department.

State-aided primary and Madhyamik schools will automatically be on the department’s radar.

Gerry Arathoon, chief executive and secretary of the Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations, said nobody could dispute the need to reduce the weight of schoolbags. But Arathoon hastened to add that the council could not dictate to its affiliates what the weight of a schoolbag should be. “This (controlling the weight) is not within the council’s jurisdiction. We have to leave it to our affiliated schools to take a decision in this regard,” he said.

A senior official of the school education department said the section dealing with syllabus and textbooks had been asked to do the groundwork for a strategy to reduce the burden. One of the possibilities is to have a system in which students of classes I and II can learn without textbooks. For the senior classes, a “judicious” timetable is seen as an alternative to carrying too many books to school.