The education department of Rajasthan has axed a page about the Right to Information Act from the Social Science textbook for Class 8 students, reported The Indian Express. The Vasundhara Raje government revised the syllabus and decided to make do without the chapter that talks about the legislation and the movement that made it a reality.
The Act came about after a nationwide movement, National Campaign for People’s Right to Information, led by political and social activists Aruna Roy and Nikhil De, among others. Roy and De now run an NGO called Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan. “Removing a chapter on an Act — a movement that is a matter of pride for the entire nation — appears to have been done with malafide intentions,” read a statement issued by the MKSS.
They will soon approach the state government asking them to immediately stop making such changes to text books. They said the people of the state had played an important role in bringing about the Act, and strongly criticised the government decision saying that it was done for political reasons.
The Act came about in 2005 when the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance was in power at the Centre. But the RTI Act is not the only part of the book to bite the dust. The name of India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, does not find any mention in the revised Social Science textbook of the Rajasthan Board of Secondary Education.
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