Bhubaneswar, Odisha Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi on Friday suspended four senior officials, including the former director of the Directorate of Teacher Education and SCERT, over large-scale errors detected in newly published textbooks for classes 1 to 8.
The action was taken based on the report submitted by a high-level inquiry committee headed by Development Commissioner DK Singh.
Besides Manoj Padhi, the former director of the Directorate of Teacher Education and SCERT, the three other suspended officials, all serving as assistant directors, are Pralipta Mishra, Dilip Kumar Sahu and Bharati Tudu.
Padhi is currently the special secretary in the department of school and mass education.
Disciplinary proceedings have also been initiated against six assistant directors — Vandita Patnaik, Manas Ranjan Raut, Vinod Mohapatra, Prashant Kumar Sahu, Manas Kumar Nayak and Sudarshan Santhara.
The committee has also recommended a 14-point action plan to improve textbook preparation and prevent such errors in future.
The textbooks had drawn widespread criticism over factual inaccuracies at more than 1,600 places.
Among the errors were describing Isaac Newton as a pilot, misidentifying the Hampi temple as the Konark Sun Temple, and using images of landmarks from other states
in the Odisha context.
The mistakes triggered concern among teachers, parents and the public as the new academic session commenced.
The textbooks were prepared by the Directorate of Teacher Education and the State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) as part of curriculum revisions aligned with the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020.
According to officials, the inquiry committee found serious lapses in content review, fact-checking and quality control during the preparation and printing of the textbooks.
Accepting the committee’s recommendations, the Chief Minister’s Office (CMO) said SCERT would maintain a master errata register and provide every student with a copy of the corrected content.
A Quality Assurance Cell will also be set up in SCERT to strengthen the textbook preparation process.
The CMO further said no textbook would be sent for printing in future without mandatory approval of language, images, data and printing quality.
Other recommendations include declaring the corrected PDF version as the official teaching copy, conducting immediate orientation programmes for teachers on the corrections, preparing a responsibility matrix for every error, and issuing show-cause notices to the DTP agency, printer and approving authority, followed by appropriate action.
The panel also recommended constituting subject-wise Curricular Area Groups and book-wise Textbook Development Committees on the lines of NCERT, introducing a four-stage proofing system with a final locked PDF mechanism, creating a Public Errata Portal, prescribing penalties, performance-based scoring and blacklisting of printers and vendors, and conducting pilot testing for every new textbook before publication.
