Bengaluru: The new textbook revision committee formed to look into errors and distortion of facts in school textbooks of the new syllabus from classes 1 to 10, had its first meeting on Thursday.

Kimmane Ratnakar, Minister for Primary and Secondary Education,  presided over the meeting.  Speaking on the sidelines of the programme, Nagendra Kumar, Managing Director, Karnataka Textbook Society, said that the revision committee would be ready with the revised textbooks by May, although the new version will be introduced only in the academic year 2016-17.

“The committee will be working to revise errors in all 352 titles in 7 mediums. Members of the revision committee have been asked to do a very thorough work,” he said.  Speaking at the inauguration of the meeting, Ratnakar said: “As many as 171 members are part of the committee. No changes will be made in a hurry. We will make sure that sentiments of no community and religion are hurt.”

The government introduced a new syllabus based on the National Curriculum Framework, 2005, starting from 2012 in a phased manner. As part of the new syllabus, new textbooks for classes 5 and 8 were introduced that year. This was followed by new textbooks for classes 1, 2, 6 and 9 in 2013 and for classes 3, 4, 7 and 10 in 2014.

Since the academic year 2012-13, when the first batch of new textbooks was introduced, a number of errors in various subjects were pointed out by academicians and various organisations. Instances of attempts to saffronise textbooks were also pointed out by a number of groups.