CBSE students stuck with flawed textbook

The textbooks — published by the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT), India, after 2000, with distorted and communally biased portions, printing errors and inaccuracies — will not be withdrawn this year in the light of utmost concern for the problems and dislocation faced by students and teachers in the middle of the ongoing session, he said, adding that the decision was issued to all schools through an advisory issued by the NCERT recently.

In a 12-page advisory issued in June 2004, NCERT has asked teachers to cut out the "biases" and supplement them with "facts" from the old books (pre-2000). In this advisory, the NCERT claimed to have added some new characters, events and ideas that were "missing" in the "saffron" school texts.

The NCERT has asked teachers to tell students about Kabir, Bhagat Singh, the Russian and the Chinese Revolution (of 1911), Mahatma as a mass leader and socialism as a political thought.

Mr Rao admitted that anything that had to do with socialism or liberal thinking was omitted by the NDA regime, in addition to some major historical events and persons from the textbooks.

“The NCERT has admitted that the books brought out after 2000 are full of bias and inaccuracies and have therefore asked teachers to go to old (pre-saffron) NCERT textbooks to fill these gaps.”

However, for the current session 2004-2005, and to help teachers cope with the substandard and flawed history books, the NCERT has reprinted its pre-2000 history books (for classes VI-VIII as well as XI, XII) to provide a few copies free of cost to each school to serve as a ready reference.

This, however, is not being done for Classes IX and X, because the present integrated social studies syllabus is different from that of the pre-2000 books.