‘Sania’ Nehwal, ‘Presian’ Gulf: Errors Riddle Karnataka Textbooks

Karnataka’s Education Department had brought out revised textbooks for 2017-2018 academic year.

According to a news report, the textbooks carry a number of spelling errors, grammatical errors, printing faults and even factual errors. Image used for representation. (Photo: Reuters)

The Congress-led Karnataka government's enthusiastic effort to bring the state syllabus at par with the CBSE appears to have lost steam at the very beginning of the academic year.

On Tuesday, Bangalore Mirror reported that many of the revised textbooks across different classes, carry a number of glaring errors. This includes spelling errors, grammatical errors, printing faults and even factual errors.

For example, consider this:

A physical education textbook states, “Who is this Sania Nehwal? The badminton player who won a bronze at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics.”

Incidentally, ‘Saina’ Nehwal won the bronze at the London Olympics in 2012 while PV Sindhu took the silver medal at Rio. And if that’s not embarrassing enough, the first chapter of the Class 10 Social Science textbook misspells “Persian Gulf” as “Presian Gulf”.

The first chapter is, ‘The Advent of Europeans to India’ (sic) and in the first paragraph there is ‘Presian’ Gulf printed instead of Persian. Students will definitely pick up this spelling. I don’t know why nobody ran a spellcheck despite taking so long to revise the textbooks.

Manjunath ML, a History teacher told <i>Bangalore Mirror</i>

Other teachers who spoke to Bangalore Mirror also seemed worried about students replicating the mistakes during exams.

The state syllabus had gone through a major revision after the Education Minister Tanveer Sait decided to address the “gaps”. After an expert review committee was formed in January 2015, the revised textbooks were to be distributed to 75,000 schools in Karnataka.

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Prominent writer, Baragur Ramachandran, was at the helm of this review committee that also looked into allegations of saffronisation in the earlier textbooks. When The News Minute reached out to Baragur Ramachandra, he claimed that the errors weren't as grave as people were claiming them to be.

Everybody is pointing out that Saina Nehwal’s name has been misspelled. But this is a composing error and there are other printing errors. What can we do about them? But I must admit that there are a few factual errors that will be looked into.

Baragur Ramachandra

Ramachandra added that the Education Department will issue a corrigendum soon and that an expert committee will be constituted to look into the factual errors. He said:

Within a week’s time, the expert committee will go through all the textbooks and identify the factual errors. A mail will be sent to all the schools informing them about the factual errors, so that they can rectify them during classes.

(This article was published in an arrangement with The News Minute.)