RTI Act blacked out in Rajasthan school books

A page in Rajasthan school textbooks has been removed following the revision, a report said.

Jaipur: The Right To Information (RTI) Act has become the latest casualty of the Rajasthan government's move to revise syllabus.

A page in Rajasthan school textbooks has been removed following the revision, The Indian Express reported on Wednesday.

This comes after references to India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and other freedom fighters were axed from the school History curriculum.

As per the report, RTI Act was prominently highlighted on page 105 in chapter 12 of the Social Science textbook for Class VIII in state schools. However, the same has now been removed in the “restructured” textbook.

Apart from talking about the RTI Act, the page also detailed the people’s movement that led to the framing of the Act.

The Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) said in a statement: “Removing a chapter on an Act — a movement which is a matter of pride for the entire nation — appears to have been done with malafide intentions. While the RTI movement and Act are being included in curricula across the world, it has been removed from the textbooks of Rajasthan…. The poor and deprived people of Rajasthan played a major part in the RTI struggle.”

The MKSS claimed 'political reasons' were behind the changes in textbooks.

“The government wants to remove certain parts of history altogether so that future generations can have no knowledge of them,” it alleged.