Chapter on Railway Minister Pulled off from Text Book
Patna: January 7, 2008
In a moral setback for the Railway Minister and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) president Lalu Prasad Yadav, the state pulled out an 8th grade Hindi text book from Bihar schools that sang the paeans of the Railway Minister under the chapter called 'Mitti ke Gaurav'.
The chapter that also attempted to immortalize two other former Bihar Chief Ministers Bhola Paswan Shastri and Karpoori Thakur was pulled out of the text book after the State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT), during a recent analysis, decided to withdraw the chapter due to controversies surrounding the Railway Minister, particularly in view of the fodder scam, and a number of other scams in Bihar during his tenure as the Chief Minister.
The idea to include a chapter on Yadav was the brainchild of Hindi writer Harivansh Narain and was introduced in the text book in 1993 at the recommendations of an editorial board of the Bihar State Text Book Corporation of which the RJD leader Ramvachan Rai was a member.
Starting the next session of the school in April, the chapter on Shastri, Thakur, and Yadav would be replaced by a new chapter on the life and works of Mahatma Phule, a social reformer and educationist of the 19th century.
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