Bhubaneswar: Odisha government Friday suspended four senior officials over errors found in school textbooks and initiated disciplinary proceedings against six assistant directors.
The action was taken based on the report submitted by a high-level inquiry committee headed by Development Commissioner DK Singh.
According to the sources, Manoj Kumar Padhy, former Director of Teachers Training and SCERT, along with Assistant Directors Pralipta Mishra, Dilip Kumar Sahu, and Bharati Tudu, were also placed under suspension.
Padhy 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.
Earlier in the day, the three-member committee probing errors in Odisha school textbooks submitted its report to Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi. Headed by the Development Commissioner Deo Ranjan Kumar Singh, the panel submitted its findings within the seven-day deadline.
The committee was constituted after at least 1,678 errors surfaced in textbooks prescribed for the current academic session for students of Classes I to VIII. This drew criticism from teachers, parents and Opposition parties. CM Majhi later directed the panel to identify officials and agencies responsible for publishing inaccurate content and submit a report within a week.
Among the other widely discussed mistakes are the description of Sir Isaac Newton as a ‘great pilot’ instead of a scientist, the use of an image of Karnataka’s Vidhan Soudha in place of the Odisha Legislative Assembly, and the identification of Hampi’s famous stone chariot as the Konark Sun Temple. Other inaccuracies reportedly involve Odisha’s geography, history and cultural heritage. Odisha Parents’ Federation described the publication of the error-ridden textbooks as a serious failure of the education system.
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.