-The Hindu At Kottaguda village, residents are yet to come to terms with loss of lives A week after a late-night raid by the police and the CRPF led to the death of several tribal villagers in Bijapur district, the Chhattisgarh government announced a judicial inquiry to ascertain the chronology of the events, the reasons behind the firing and the identities of those killed. The inquiry will be headed by a judge of...

-The Indian Express It is not just 21 cartoons that have been deemed “inappropriate” for NCERT textbooks. The Thorat Committee has frowned on much more, disapproving of “ too many cartoons of Mrs Indira Gandhi” in the Class XII textbooks, and objecting to some Amul advertisements. Set up in May following MPs’ objections to political cartoons in textbooks, the six-member committee headed by ICSSR chairman S K Thorat vetted six textbooks that...

-The Indian Express Prof M S S Pandian is not the sole dissenter as far as the Thorat committee’s recommendations on removal of cartoons from NCERT textbooks go. A number of academic experts roped in by the committee to review Political Science textbooks, which are at the centre of a controversy over “controversial” cartoons, also echoed views similar to Pandian and fully supported the cartoons. Set up in May following MPs’ objections...

-Down to Earth   Buy an Indian breed from Australia In June last year, we visited Malaysia on the invitation of the country’s oldest and most active consumer action group, The Consumer Association of Penang, to study the livestock production systems and to advise on how these can be transformed into more sustainable and less industrial farming systems. The past 40 years of aggressive industrial growth in Malaysia has seen small-scale peasant agriculture and...

The dissent note by a member of a government appointed committee reviewing textbooks of political science avers that the pedagogic intent and methods of the NCERT textbooks are sound and they encourage critical dialogue among learners.  M.S.S. Pandian (mathiaspandian57@gmail.com) is member, the NCERT Committee for Reviewing the Textbooks of Social Science/Political Science and teaches history at the Centre for Historical Studies, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.   It...