Yogendra Yadav, Suhas Palshikar threaten to sue NCERT if their names aren't removed from new textbooks

In a letter to DS Saklani, NCERT Director, the academicians said, 'This mail was followed by a collective letter by a majority of scholars associated with the Textbook Development Team in Political Science making the same request. The NCERT did not act upon our request, nor did it have the courtesy to write back to us'.

New Delhi, DHNS: Academicians Yogendra Yadav and Suhas Palshikar on Monday threatened to sue the NCERT if they did not remove their names from the list of contributors. Yadav and Palshikar had sent in a similar request last year, following which 26 academicians, too, asked the syllabus body to drop their respective names owing to changes that were made in school textbooks.

In a letter to DS Saklani, NCERT Director, the academicians said that in their earlier communication that has “categorically asked” that their names are not used in the soft copies as well as print editions of the textbooks.

“This mail was followed by a collective letter by a majority of scholars associated with the Textbook Development Team in Political Science making the same request. The NCERT did not act upon our request, nor did it have the courtesy to write back to us,” the letter states.

Yadav told DH that he found the development “bizarre”.

“There are people who fight to have their names in a publication; we are asking for the absolute opposite … How can they force us to put our names? When we asked them the last time, they did not respond to us but said publicly that they are just acknowledging us,” Yadav said.

The academicians also said that, despite the letter, the NCERT went ahead and published and distributed the new edition of these six textbooks without removing their names from the publications that they “do not wish to be associated with”.

“We are also distressed to learn that the NCERT has taken a step further in its drive towards indiscriminate distortion of these textbooks. Both of us, as Chief Advisors of the original textbooks, have already registered our strong disapproval of this unethical, unacademic and illegal practice of mutilation of textbooks that violate both the authors’ rights to intellectual property and the students’ right to quality education,” they further wote.

In the letter, they also said that both of them do not want the NCERT to “hide behind our names”. “... to pass on to students such textbooks of Political Science that we find politically biased, academically indefensible and pedagogically dysfunctional.”