4-5 to be punished for textbook errors: Ministry

Published : 03 Mar 2017, 13:21

Jagoroniya Desk

The education ministry has finally decided to take punitive measures against the officials responsible for producing erroneous primary and secondary school textbooks.

Secretary of the secondary and higher education directorate Sohrab Hossain said this to Prothom Alo on Thursday.

He said, the accused will initially be removed from the National Curriculum and Textbook Board (NCTB) and then cases will be filed against them.

He did not mention names of the persons concerned but said 4-5 people who were involved with the process of preparing the textbooks have been indicted.

After a widespread criticism, the ministry on 9 January made two officials -- NCTB chief editor Pritish Kumar Sarkar and its senior expert Lana Humaira Khan -- officers on special duty (OSDs) over the textbook errors.
A day later, an NCTB artist-cum-designer, Suzaul Abedin, was also suspended following a preliminary report submitted by a three-member probe committee over the matter.

The ministry and NCTB sources said Lana Humaira Khan was responsible for refinement of the 'Amar Bangla Book' for the grade-III pupils. A popular poem named 'Adarsha Chhele' written by Kusumkumari Das, was erroneously published in the textbook.

The probe body recommended to the NCTB authorities that a 'Centre of Excellence' body be made to check the errors hereafter.

At the beginning of January this year, the government distributed nearly 362,182,285 textbooks among about 4.25 crore students between pre-primary and secondary levels for the 2017 academic session.

However, numerous spelling and printing mistakes were detected in the textbooks.

Source: Prothom Alo

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