TNI Bureau: The Odisha government has suspended four SCERT officials, including then Director of Teachers’ Training and SCERT Manoj Padhi, after a high-level committee submitted its report on the large-scale errors found in school textbooks. The action was taken on the directions of Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi based on the committee’s recommendations.

Besides Padhi, Assistant Directors Pralipta Mishra, Dillip Kumar Sahu and Bharati Tudu have been suspended. Disciplinary proceedings have also been initiated against six other Assistant Directors for their alleged lapses in the textbook preparation and approval process.

To address the issue and prevent its recurrence, the government has decided to implement all 14 recommendations made by the committee.

Key Recommendations of the Committee:

• Publish a Master Errata Register within seven days.
• Provide replacement pages/reprinted inserts for serious errors.
• Provide printed correction sheets to all students.
• Declare the corrected PDF as the official teaching Version.
• Conduct immediate correction orientation for teachers.
• Prepare a responsibility matrix for every error.
• Issue show-cause notices and take action against the DTP agency, printer and approving authority.
• Constitute a Textbook Quality Assurance Cell in SCERT.
• Create subject-wise curricular groups and book-wise Textbook development committees on the NCERT model.
• Introduce a four-proof system and a final locked PDF mechanism.
• Create a Public Errata Portal.
• Introduce penalties, performance scoring and blacklisting provisions for erring printers and vendors.
• Conduct pilot testing of all new textbooks.
• In future, no textbook should go for printing without final academic, language, factual, illustration and production clearance.

The measures are aimed at improving textbook quality and ensuring that similar errors do not recur in future editions.