After drawing a lot of criticism from several education experts and organisations, the Karnataka Government and Suresh Kumar, Primary and Secondary Education Minister is yet to decide on whether or not to include the chapters on Tipu Sultan, Hyder Ali and Sangolli Rayanna in the class 6 and 7 Social Science textbooks. The chapters had been axed recently, due to the reduction of portions to facilitate a reduced school year. According to sources from the Education Department, the Minister has been asked to include these chapters and drop the chapters of British Rulers in India from school textbooks.
In July, the minister had said that the chapters pertaining to Tipu Sultan and Hyder Ali were not meant to be deleted completely from the textbooks. The decision was taken in the interest of students as the schools have been shut down for more than four months. As a result, there was a 30 per cent reduction in the syllabus as the only way to reduce the burden on teachers and students as well. This decision was also meant to reduce the number of working days from 200 to 120. Similarly, the decision of dropping the chapters on salient features of the Constitution and so on from class 9 textbooks is also yet to be finalised.
Apart from this, there were two panels formed to make recommendations on dropping of particular chapters. A panel headed by Ashwath Narayan, who is a History professor from Mysuru as well as another panel headed by T R Chandrashekar from Hampi University had suggested the inclusion of these chapters, despite the exigent circumstances. When Edexlive contacted Prof Ashwath Narayan to check about the controversy, he says, "When the textbook committee met me two months ago, they told me that they will include these chapters on Tipu Sultan, Hyder Ali, Sangolli Rayanna and others. I had accepted their decision and welcomed it also. After that I am not sure of what actually happened and whether they reprinted these textbooks or not."
Once the decision is finalised, the Textbook Committee will be uploading all the dropped chapters back on their website and incorporate it in the social science textbooks as well.
