Odisha textbook inquiry flags rushed process, missing writer orientation

An inquiry into the errors that disrupted the first half of Odisha's current academic session has pointed to a hurried and loosely supervised textbook preparation process, even as the opposition Biju Janata Dal (BJD) kept up pressure on the state government during the monsoon session of the Legislative Assembly.

The three-member committee — chaired by Development Commissioner Deoranjan Kumar Singh, with Secretary of Odia Language, Literature and Culture Bijay Ketan Upadhyaya and Smita Pani of the General Administration and Public Grievance Department as members — recorded several lapses in how the books were readied.

According to the findings, writers and experts were given a two-day orientation when new textbooks were developed previously, but no formal orientation on translation and contextualisation was held for the books prepared in 2025-26. The School and Mass Education Department was found to have compressed the exercise, leaving inadequate time for the work.

Subject experts, who earlier had three months to review and edit the final manuscript, were given just one day in this instance — a period the committee described as insufficient. The entire process, including the final expert review, was carried out in workshop mode.

Across subjects, the total time spent on development, review, desktop publishing of the reviewed manuscript, proofreading and final expert scrutiny ranged from 12 to 30 days per subject within a span of about four months. The full exercise of developing 55 books, from the initial stage to final expert review, ran between March and November 2025.

The committee also found that resource persons were repeatedly assigned multiple roles for the same class and subject — writer, reviewer, proofreader and final subject expert. This overlap, it noted, allowed errors to slip through, particularly when the same individual served as both writer and reviewer or final expert.

A comparison with the introduction of new textbooks for Classes I to VIII after the National Curriculum Framework, 2005, showed that those books were rolled out in phases across three academic sessions between 2007 and 2012. The present set — translations and contextualisations of NCERT books along with Odia-language textbooks — was developed within a much shorter window in 2025-26 and introduced across all classes from I to VIII in a single session in 2026-27.

The committee recommended that if an unrealistic or excessively compressed timeline for preparation and printing had led to relaxed academic review, proofing and fact-checking, supervisory responsibility should be fixed at the departmental level.

After errors surfaced in the media, the Director of Teacher Education and the State Council of Educational Research and Training re-examined the books and detected 1,731 errors, of which five were factual and the rest related to spelling and printing.

Acting on the recommendations, Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi suspended former SCERT Director Manoj Kumar Padhy and three assistant directors, and ordered departmental proceedings against six assistant directors.

The BJD, however, has continued to demand the resignation of School and Mass Education Minister Nityanand Gond, arguing that the errors were not merely procedural lapses and that his leadership and supervisory role must be examined and responsibility fixed. On the second day of the monsoon session, party members staged protests inside and outside the House.

RTI activist Pradip Pradhan, who received a copy of the inquiry report on Monday, said the government had accepted most of the findings and recommendations, but that many questions remained about the careless steps that disrupted the academic session.