Karnataka admits to 'errors' on Ambedkar, to rectify textbooks

The BJP government on Monday admitted that the revised school textbooks, which are already under the scanner for controversial content, have “errors” about B R Ambedkar.

Primary & Secondary Education Minister B C Nagesh said that the mistakes would be rectified.

The admission came after the Congress and others pointed out that the Rohith Chakrathirtha committee that revised the textbooks dropped the phrase ‘Architect of the Constitution of India’ for Ambedkar.

DH verified this indepdently and found that the Class 9 Social Science textbook chapter named ‘Our Constitution’ does not have the phrase ‘Architect of the Constitution of India’. This was present in the previous textbooks that were framed by the committee headed by Baragur Ramachandrappa.

“Not just about Dr Ambedkar, any other such errors will be rectified,” Nagesh told DH.

Even Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai said the government is ready to reprint the textbooks to rectify errors.

He slammed Leader of the Opposition Siddaramaiah, who wrote to him earlier in the day asking the government to put the new textbooks on hold. “He does politics in everything. This isn’t the first time the textbooks were revised,” he said.

‘‘Revision has been done many times in the past and some errors do creep in. In fact, some of the objections being raised now pertain to the revision that was done during (Siddaramaiah’s) time. Did he withdraw the textbooks then? The government is ready to fix the errors, regardless of the topic of person, and reprint the textbooks,” Bommai
said.

Officials, however, said reprinting textbooks is not possible. They said 74% of the printing is complete and 68% of the textbooks have reached the schools. “Reprinting of the textbooks is an expensive affair and at this stage we can only print the specific chapters where errors or objections are proven,” they said.

All other objections, including wrongful attribution to the song ‘Aadisi nodu, bilisi nodu’, officials said that such objections can be filed with the Karnataka Text Book Society.