During the monsoon session of the Odisha Legislative Assembly, the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) intensified pressure on the state government after a probe revealed that the new textbooks for classes I‑VIII contained 1,731 errors, ranging from misspellings to five factual mistakes.
The inquiry committee – chaired by Development Commissioner Deoranjan Kumar Singh and including Bijay Ketan Upadhyaya, Secretary of Odia Language, Literature and Culture, and Smita Pani of the General Administration and Public Grievance Department – concluded that writers received no formal orientation on translation or contextualisation, a step that had been standard in earlier cycles.
According to the report, subject‑matter experts were allotted only a single day to review manuscripts that had previously been given three months, and the entire development, desktop publishing and proofreading of each subject took between 12 and 30 days over a four‑month window from March to November 2025.
The committee also flagged the practice of assigning the same individuals multiple roles – writer, reviewer, proofreader and final subject expert – which it said created conflicts of interest and allowed errors to slip through unchecked.
After media reports of the flaws, the Director of Teacher Education and the State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) re‑examined the books and confirmed the 1,731 errors, of which only five were factual while the rest were spelling or printing mistakes.
Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi acted on the committee’s recommendations by suspending former SCERT Director Manoj Kumar Padhy and three assistant directors, and he ordered departmental proceedings against six additional assistant directors.
The BJD, however, has continued to press for the resignation of School and Mass Education Minister Nityanand Gond, arguing that the errors reflect deeper supervisory failures, and its legislators staged protests inside and outside the assembly on the second day of the session.
The episode underscores a stark contrast with the phased textbook introductions that followed the National Curriculum Framework of 2005, when new books were rolled out over three academic sessions between 2007 and 2012, rather than being compressed into a single 2026‑27 session.