Political parties across the spectrum get into a tangle over an innocuous cartoon in a school textbook THE textbooks of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) are in the news again. This time, it is not history but political science textbooks that managed to get almost all Members of Parliament on their feet on an emotive issue and for reasons that defied logic. One day before the 60th...

The thrust of Prabhat Patnaik's argument (“Parliament's say extends to the classroom,” The Hindu , May 22, 2012) is clear. It is to declare illegitimate the arguments against government action on the recent textbook controversy. What is this hullabaloo about, Patnaik seems to be saying: what is under threat is not the status of critical pedagogy in the textbooks but the jurisdiction of the Parliament. The larger argument within Patnaik's polemic...

The thrust of my argument is not “clear,” alas, even to a person of Neeladri Bhattacharya's perspicacity. It is not “to declare illegitimate the arguments against government action on the recent textbook controversy”: I have explicitly criticised the “government action” in a collective public statement (The Hindu, May 17, 2012). But I oppose the view, frequently articulated in the media, that Parliament's jurisdiction must not extend to questions of curricula and...

-The Assam Sentinel DIPHU: The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA), was introduced with an objective to provide legal guarantee of 100 days of wage in a financial year to every rural household, whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work at the minimum wage rate as has been prescribed for agricultural labour in the State. However, instead of helping the poor in their uplift, MNREGA has become a...

A close reading of the Political Science textbook shows that it is complex, moves beyond pat answers, and treats the Constitution as a living document. It was produced in the light of the National Curriculum Framework 2005, which in itself was a major attempt to democratise education, and reverse the National Curriculum Framework 2000 which was casteist and sexist. Kumkum Roy (kumkumr@yahoo.com) is with the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru...