Who featured in your textbooks the most? Was it the Mahatma Gandhi, or was it the freedom fighters? Or was equal importance given to all the subjects and public figures?
For the State Education Department, books on Prime Minister Narendra Modi are apparently better literature than those on Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, and Mahatma Phule. The State government will be buying books worth ?59.42 lakh on Mr. Modi as supplementary material for students in Classes I-V in schools run by it.
While the PM tops the list, books worth ?3.25 lakh on Mahatma Gandhi, ?24.28 lakh on Dr. Ambedkar and ?22.63 lakh on Mahatma Phule will also be stocked in government school libraries as supplementary reading material.
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The books on Mr. Modi include 72,933 Marathi copies and 33 Gujarati copies of Chacha Choudhary and Narendra Modi, each costing ?35; 424 Hindi copies of Pradhanmantri Narendra Modi at the same price, and 7,148 English copies of the same book. All are published by Diamond Pocket Books Pvt Ltd.
In addition, the Education Department is also buying 69,416 Marathi copies of Narendra Modi. costing ?45 each and published by Vilas Book Agency & Prakashan. The government will also be purchasing and distributing 72,933 Marathi copies of a book on former PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee. A complete list of the books sanctioned on January 13, 2018, is available with an Indian daily-The Hindu.
The books on Mahatma Gandhi include 2,675 copies of Samrat Prakashan’s Mahatma Gandhi, 33 Gujarati copies of the same book by Diamond Pocket Books and 7,260 Marathi copies of Nishingandha Prakashan’s Ek Mahatma. The government has sanctioned the purchase of 79,388 copies of different biographies of Dr. Ambedkar for ?24.28 lakh and 78,348 copies of different biographies of Mahatma Phule and Savitribai Phule for ?22.63 lakh.
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Dr. Sunil Magar, director, Balbharati and director-in-charge, State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT), said, “The books have been chosen by an expert committee on merit. Just because it is Modi, you are talking about it. But we have other books also.”
Criticising the government, Leader of Opposition in the Legislative Council Dhananjay Munde said, “It seems this government considers Narendra Modi to be bigger than Gandhi, Ambedkar, and Phule. It is trying to occupy children’s imagination in these politically motivated ways.”
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