Date:17/10/2002 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2002/10/17/stories/2002101707340100.htm

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Opposition parties reject new NCERT textbooks

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI OCT. 16. The Opposition parties today joined hands to renew their battle against ``saffronisation of education'' and ``unanimously" rejected the National Curriculum Framework for School Education (NCFSE) and the two social science textbooks brought out by the National Council of Education Research and Training recently. This and other decisions were taken at a meeting of the Opposition leaders called by the Communist Party of India here.

The parties decided that they would not adopt the textbooks in the States where they were in power and enlarged the scope of their protest by appealing to the allies of the Bharatiya Janata Party — the Telugu Desam Party in Andhra Pradesh and the Biju Janata Dal in Orissa — to join hands.

The textbooks, `Contemporary India' for class IX and `India and the World' for class VI, were introduced after the Supreme Court lifted its interim stay on their publication. The Opposition parties claim that the books contain ``errors and slants'' which need to be removed.

Briefing correspondents later, the CPI general secretary, A. B. Bardhan, said the parties had also decided on a mass movement against the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance at the Centre. They would organise a national convention here either during the last week of November or first week of December. The parties demanded that the Central Advisory Board on Education (CABE) be reconstituted. And that the Centre convene a meeting of the State Education Ministers, since education was on the concurrent list of the Constitution.

The States needed to be consulted before any change in the national education policy was introduced, they maintained.

Explaining the rationale behind asking Andhra Pradesh and Orissa to be part of the campaign, Mr. Bardhan said that their Education Ministers had joined the Opposition when it staged a walkout from a Conference of State Education Ministers in 1998, protesting against the attempt to `spiritualise and nationalise' the school syllabus.

The Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, Manmohan Singh, said the Congress president, Sonia Gandhi, had already instructed the Congress-ruled States to appoint a committee to go into the changes made in the textbooks.

The leaders who attended the meeting included the CPI (M) politburo member, Prakash Karat, the Bihar Education Minister, Ramchandra Purve (RJD), Rama Shankar Kaushik and Mohan Singh (Samajwadi Party), Surendra Mohan (Janata Dal-Secular), Lok Janshakti Party chief, Ram Vilas Paswan, Abani Roy (RSP), G. Devarajan (AIFB), Master Pitambar (Nationalist Congress Party) and J. Chittaranjan and D. Raja (CPI). The former NCERT chief, Arjun Dev, was also present.