Union Minister of State HRD, Mahendra Nath Pandey on Tuesday evening said the Centre does not have any plans to delete Rabindranath Tagore’s writing and works of other renowned personalities from NCERT text books.
Pandey echoed Union School Education and Literacy Ministry Secretary Anil Swarup, who had earlier in the day denied having knowledge about any such move.
Responding to queries by reporters at an ASSOCHAM function in Kolkata that the Centre has any plans to act on a five-page list of recommendations by a certain organisation, which included removal of a poem by Punjabi poet Pash, a couplet by Mirza Ghalib, extracts from MF Husain’s autobiography and the thoughts of Rabindranath Tagore from the text book, Pandey described it as “wrong information.”
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We are not thinking anything along these lines,” he said describing Tagore as an icon. Swarup had earlier told reporters on a similar question, “I don’t think there is any such proposal.” To a question, if he had seen any such recommendation, Swarup said: “I don’t recall having seen it.”
Earlier in the week, Former head of RSS education wing Vidya Bharati, Dina Nath Batra send a recommendation wanting the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) to remove Tagore and Urdu word’s from school textbooks.
