Odisha CM Mohan Majhi cracks down on school textbook errors; 4 suspended

Bhubaneswar, June 26 (IANS) In a significant development, Odisha Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi has suspended four senior officials while initiating disciplinary action against six others following the receipt of the inquiry report submitted by the committee constituted under the chairmanship of the Development Commissioner to examine errors in school textbooks, according to an official statement issued by the Chief Minister’s Office (CMO) on Friday.

Acting on the recommendations of the committee, the Chief Minister has taken stringent action against the officials found responsible for the serious lapse.

As per the decision, the former director of Directorate of Teacher Education and the State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT), Manoj Padhi, along with three Assistant Directors — Pralipta Mishra, Dilip Kumar Sahu, and Bharati Tudu — have been placed under suspension.

In addition, disciplinary proceedings have been initiated against six Assistant Directors — Bandita Pattnaik, Manas Ranjan Rout, Manoranjan Mahapatra, Dr Prashant Kumar Sahu, Manas Kumar Nayak, and Dr Sudarshan Santara. Additionally, the committee had recommended 14 measures to improve the quality of education and rectify textbook errors.

The CMO also informed that the 14 recommendations made by the committee will be implemented by the state government.

These include the preparation of a master Errata Register by SCERT within seven days, ensuring that corrected information is provided to all students, the supply of replacement pages or reprinted inserts for serious errors, and the distribution of printed correction sheets to all students.

The three-member committee also recommended declaring the corrected PDF version as the official teaching copy, the immediate conduct of correction orientation programmes for teachers, and the creation of a Public Errata Portal.

The high-level committee further suggested the issuance of show-cause notices and the initiation of necessary and appropriate action against the DTP agency, the printer, and the approving authority, as well as the establishment of a Quality Assurance Cell within SCERT.

Furthermore, in future, no textbook will be sent to the printing press without proper approval regarding language, content, illustrations, and overall accuracy.

It is pertinent to mention here that the state government on June 18 formed a high-level committee led by Development Commissioner Anu Garg, along with members Singh, Smita Pani and Bijay Ketan Upadhyay, to investigate the publication of errors in textbooks from Class I to Class VIII.

The newly published textbooks contained nearly 1,678 identified errors. The highest number of mistakes — 705 — was found in the Class VIII textbooks alone, including 294 errors in Jijnasa, 114 in Sanskrit, 25 in Social Science, and 31 in Literature, as well as several significant errors in English and Mathematics.

–IANS

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