The National Coalition for Education Emergency has urged the government of Karnataka to immediately revoke the revisions made to textbooks and rather focus on addressing the education emergency in the state currently.

In a letter, education rights activists who are part of the coalition have said that revisions to the textbooks are regressive in nature, and have been done in an arbitrary manner, without adherence to well-defined curriculum framework and processes.

Terming it an “undemocratic” approach to revision of textbooks, the NCEE sought to know if any public consultations were held by the committee.

“The Government of Karnataka constituted a committee of seven men who took the decisions to add and drop chapters, without the broad consultation that has characterized textbook preparation in the past. In sharp contrast, the 2014 Baraguru Ramachandrappa committee worked through 27 committees comprising 172 experts to revise the textbooks and held several public consultations to hear diverse views. It is not known if the Chakratheertha committee held any public consultations in its process. The preparation of textbooks is a process that requires a high sense of responsibility, as textbooks are the primary resource to which lakhs of young minds will be exposed,” the NCEE said.

They added that as practice, academicians, teachers, and eminent citizens are consulted to get diverse inputs which enables the textbook revision exercise to stay free of biases of a few people, which process has not been followed.

Questioning the constitution of the committee, most of who, the NCEE claimed represented one community alone, they said, “The chapters dropped consist of writings of Dalit writers and progressive writers, while the chapters added are written by Brahmins. It seems that the committee has pushed the ideology of the dominant religion/caste in this process.”

Drawing attention to the pandemic induced learning loss, NCEE has said that it has only been worsened by delayed textbooks supply. When politicians play curriculum games, it is the children who suffer.

Also read: Karnataka: CM seeks report on textbook revision committee