BENGALURU: Karnataka Textbook Society (KTBS) has constituted an expert committee for each subject to identify and rectify errors, if any. Following the recent media reports about the glaring mistakes in Physical Education textbook of Class 10, the chairman of the society Prof Baraguru Ramachandrappa conducted a meeting with members and teachers on Monday and constituted panels.
After the meeting, Prof Baraguru said, “If there are factual errors in the textbooks, it is our moral responsibility to accept, identify and correct them. The expert committees will submit their reports in a week.
Once the errors are identified, the same will be mailed to Managing Director of Textbook Society for further action.”“I am not saying it as an excuse, but 5 per cent of the mistakes happen due to human error. And I don’t think the errors are as big as they are publicised,” Baraguru added.
Subject experts responsible for errors may be blacklisted
Meanwhile, it has been decided to recommend to the state government to blacklist the subject experts who were involved in revision exercise of textbooks and committed factual errors. “The subject experts are on remuneration basis and we have no powers to initiate action against them. But, I can write to the government not to involve such people in future for similar works,” said the KTBS chairman.
Maths textbook had blank pages
The committee also received some official complaints and rectified the errors immediately. For example, complaints of Mathematics content in Kannada book of class 6 were received from Haveri. The chairman said such mistakes were found only in 13 books of the 8 lakhs books distributed. There were also complaints of some blank pages in Mathematics textbook from Tumkur.
PE textbook says PV Sindhu won bronze at Rio
The revised text books introduced from this academic year have some glaring mistakes, mainly in the physical education textbooks of class 10. The mistakes have been highlighted by teachers, students and parents. According to a chapter in physical education textbook, badminton player PV Sindhu won bronze at Rio Olympics 2016! The information given in English medium and Kannada medium textbooks is, however, different. Kannada medium textbook rightly says PV Sindhu won silver medal.