PM Modi's Swachh Bharat dream makes it to CBSE text books, so do grammar errors

The new government, it seems, has decided that the children of the country should be subjected to guidance from the Prime Minister himself. As a result, the PM addressed the nation on Teacher’s Day, giving teachers advice on their jobs and told them what to teach the kids of the country. In several government schools, students were made to watch his address on TV at school. However, in case he missed something out then, the CBSE board has now taken the responsibility to make sure children of the country don’t miss out on the Prime Minister’s teachings and his vision of the country. As a result, CBSE text books have now been made to include chapters on Modi’s Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. The Indian Express reports that the new study material for open-text based annual exams for class IX students are riddled with topics that are known to be favourites of Prime Minister Modi. The report notes that the English and Science text books now have chapters on the Swachch Bharat campaign and the Mangalyaan. However, most of these texts are fraught with grammatical errors. [caption id=“attachment_1822645” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Representational image. IBN Live.[/caption] IE quotes a badly-written paragraph from one of the texts as follows: “Our Prime Minister said, ‘I will not litter, I will not allow others to litter’, is what we must resolve if we are true children of this motherland’. As we clean our homes every day, why can’t this attitude not be extended to overall cleanliness and Swacch Bharat?” This is not the first time that a government-approved text book in India has been found to be full of errors. Recently, a text book published by the Gujarat Council of Educational Research and Training, was found to have 120 spelling, grammar and glaring factual errors. The book meant for standard eight students in Gujarat government schools said things like Japan had dropped a nuclear bomb on America and had the date of Mahatma Gandhi’s death wrong. Following reports of the faulty text book being circulated in schools and being read by at least 50,000 students, the Gujarat education minister had set up a two member committee to probe the matter. Let’s hope that the government takes these slips seriously. After all, it’s the PM’s favourite topics which are at the risk of being misread.