KUALA LUMPUR: Students from Standard Four until tertiary level education will receive book vouchers worth RM100 starting Friday (May 31), says Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim.
The Prime Minister said the book voucher assistance would be available after 2pm.
“For this year, we will start with the Standard Four pupils due to the financial constraints faced by the government.
“The vouchers are also eligible for secondary school students, college and university students as well as teaching institutes,” he said when launching the KL International Book Festival 2024 here on Thursday (May 30).
Anwar said the mechanism to claim the vouchers would also be revealed on Friday.
He said Education Minister Fadhlina Sidek and Higher Education Minister Datuk Seri Dr Ahmad Zambry Kadir would review the details of the mechanism and guidance of the voucher assistance.
“Starting tomorrow, we will have the format (of the book vouchers) to use them. I hope it can be completed just in time for this weekend (at the book festival),” Anwar said.
He said the book vouchers are applicable for selected titles such as classic literary books and works by national laureate Datuk Seri A. Samad Said, the late Datuk Dr Shahnon Ahmad and Datuk Dr Anwar Ridhuan.
“I have suggested that when we give the leeway to use the vouchers when purchasing the books, we also provide a list of classic novels such as Hang Tuah or books written by our national laureate.
“We also proposed that the book vouchers can be used to purchase titles on technology because we need our children to understand the basics of digitalisation and artificial intelligence (AI).
“We will provide a list of books to purchase, and half of the money can be spent on books that they want. This is because the books bought were low-quality in the previous arrangement,” Anwar added.
