Bhubaneswar: Facing a raging storm over 1,678 errors in textbooks for classes I to VIII, the Odisha govt finds itself in a peculiar situation with a corrigendum issued to fix the mistakes ending up compounding them.A true-or-false exercise in one of the textbooks for example asked students to answer whether Sir Isaac Newton was a pilot? It was misread by the review panel as a wrong question as Newton was a mathematician and physicist, without realising the actual purpose of the question.“This has led to fresh blunders in the correction list itself, including the impression that the textbook described,” said a senior official.While the corrigendum claimed to have identified 1,678 errors, officials now say the actual number may be less than half after filtering out minor issues such as spacing and formatting glitches.In the Class V English textbook Pallavi, a true-or-false exercise asks whether Newton “boiled water in place of eggs”. The questions follow a passage stating that Newton was a great scientist and narrating the anecdote that he accidentally dropped his watch into boiling water.However, the corrigendum, issued by the Directorate of Teacher Education and the State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) on June 2 and circulated to district education officers by the Odisha School Education Programme Authority on June 8, treated the true-or-false statements as textbook errors. It directed that “Sir Isaac Newton was a great pilot” be read as “Sir Isaac Newton was a great scientist” and that “He boiled water in place of eggs” be read as “He boiled watch in place of eggs.”The corrigendum also introduces fresh grammatical and typographical errors. In the first chapter, ‘Grandpa’s Glasses’, it flags the correct sentence, “Sir, what’re you looking for?”, and replaces it with “Sir, what are you are looking for?”, incorrectly repeating the word “are”.In the Class III English textbook, the expression “One is done for you” has been marked as incorrect and replaced with “One has been done for you”, though both are grammatically acceptable. Similarly, it identifies “Now write your name and the names of five of your friends” as erroneous and suggests “Now write your name and the names of your five friends”.Teachers have also pointed to an error in the corrigendum for a chapter on exponents and powers in the Class VIII mathematics textbook. While the textbook incorrectly states mᵃ × mⁿ = (mn)ᵃ, the corrigendum reproduces the same expression in the “to be read as” column, leaving the error uncorrected. In the Class VI Hindi textbook Kalika, most of the nearly 10 entries under “errors found” and “to be read as” are identical, offering no correction at all.“The corrigendum was meant to help teachers avoid confusion in classrooms. Instead, it has created another layer of uncertainty because several entries either leave the original errors untouched or introduce new ones,” said a govt school teacher, requesting anonymity.School and mass education secretary N Thirumala Naik acknowledged that the corrigendum itself contained errors and had amplified the scale of the problem.“I am not denying certain mistakes in the textbooks. However, the corrigendum has pointed many right things as errors. These are in the govt’s notice and suitable action will be taken. Very soon students will also get the error-free versions,” he said.Naik said some major textbook errors included a photograph of Karnataka’s Vidhan Soudha being printed as the Odisha assembly, the Virupaksha Temple at Hampi being identified as Konark, Niyamgiri being described as a hill in Jharkhand — an error carried over from an NCERT textbook — and Berhampur being described as a district of Odisha.The textbook controversy erupted after SCERT issued the corrigendum highlighting large-scale errors. On June 17, the Odisha govt constituted a three-member administrative inquiry committee headed by development commissioner Deoranjan Kumar Singh. Acting on its recommendations, the govt suspended four officials and initiated disciplinary proceedings against six others on June 26.
