BENGALURU:While the Department of Public Instructions drew a lot of flak for factual and grammatical errors in the revised textbooks it introduced in state schools, the state department of pre- university education has received appreciation from National National Council for Education Research and Training (NCERT) for translating various textbooks.
In an email communication to the director of pre-university education, an NCERT official said, “The translation of statistics textbook is good. The sentences and grammar structure are all correct and the whole translation of the book to Kannada language is excellent. In the textbook of Indian Economic Development, the translation work done by the subject expert is also excellent.”An official of PUE department said, “We were worried when we decided to translate NCERT textbooks to Kannada. But, our experts and teachers did a great job.”
As the department decided to introduce NCERT textbooks even for Commerce and Arts stream for PU courses from the current academic year, the translation of the text books to regional language was assigned to selected subject teachers and experts.
The translated books were sent to the NCERT experts at Regional Institute of English located at Mysore to verify errors, if any. Currently, the students of first year PUC Commerce and first and second year PUC science streams in the state are studying NCERT text books. From the 2018-19 academic year, NCERT text books will be introduced even for the arts stream.
“The translation work of the arts textbooks is going on, and target is to introduce the same from the next academic year,” said C Shikha, director PUE department. As the syllabus of the arts stream is vast, the department has decided to introduce the same from the next academic year. Experts are on the job to translate the arts text books.
As per norms, textbooks from Class 1 to PUC should be revised once in five years. Following instructions given by the National Curriculum Framework (NCF), 2012, the department switched over to NCERT textbooks for Science during 2012-13 for first-year PUC and 2013-14 for second-year PUC.
Recently, the revised textbooks of primary and secondary level had received negative comments and objections from NCERT. A recent analysis report sent from NCERT stated that, “the revised text books have lack of activities that would help develop critical thinking in children.”