It is obvious that the leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are more comfortable with typing than writing. The value of good education is alien to most of them. A series of education scams under the BJP governments tell us where these leaders stand when it comes to recognising the sanctity of wholesome education.

We were witness to the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) and the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) scams right under the nose of the Narendra Modi regime. We have also seen how the education mafia in different BJP-ruled states have plundered crores of public money meant for providing value education to school children.

The latest example is Odisha where the state government has clandestinely diverted taxpayer’s money to enrich private publishers, if opposition voices are to be believed then most likely in Gujarat, affiliated to the saffron establishment.

Look at the cloak of secrecy: the Mohan Majhi government was officially forced to admit that the bulk of the school textbooks – published by the State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) – were given to private printers only when a tsunami of blunders in those books came to the surface.

Experts pointed out more than 1,600 egregious errors in the textbooks of class I to class VIII; the Majhi government admitted to 1678 factual, grammatical and spelling inaccuracies and wrong references, with class VIII textbooks alone accounting for 705 grave errors.

Sample some of them: Sir Isaac Newton was shown in an aviator’s uniform and introduced as a great pilot in a class VIII science text book; Karnataka assembly building was featured as the Odisha Vidhan Sabha; Niyamgiri Hills, the home of Dongria Kondh tribals in Odisha, was shown as a mountain range of Jharkhand. An image of the iconic stone chariot at Vijaya Vitthala Temple of Hampi in Karnataka was identified as the Konark Sun Temple in Odisha in another textbook. 

There were numerous blunders in textbooks of mathematics, science and geography subjects as well. Horrendous conceptual errors abounded; one example, equinox was treated as interchangeable........

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