Kerala - Thiruvananthapuram   

KPCC team to meet Gavai

Thiruvananthapuram:

The Kerala Pradesh Congress Committee (KPCC) has decided to meet Governor R.S. Gavai and brief him about the “grave crisis” the education sector is facing on account of the State government’s decision to revise school textbooks with the assistance of the same team that prepared the controversial Class VII social studies textbook.

Announcing the decision here on Sunday, KPCC president Ramesh Chennithala said the State government had also failed to fulfil its promise of replacing controversial portions in the Class VII textbook on the basis of the K.N. Panikkar committee’s interim report and the KPCC expert committee report. The Director of Public Instruction had not even given the new revised version for publication. “It has also come to our notice that some teachers are going ahead with teaching the controversial portions,” he said.

The government decision to entrust revision of textbooks for the next academic year to the same team of experts and CPI(M) fellow travellers was not justifiable and would only further vitiate the situation in the education sector that was gripped by a series of agitations, he said.

The KPCC president said that instructions had been issued to the party’s lower level functionaries not to declare localised hartals without the KPCC’s permission.

Replying to a question, he said the Opposition did not want to call a hartal in protest against the unpopular policies of the LDF government as it would put people to further hardships even though the situation was ripe for a hartal.

In reply to a question of admitting the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) in the UDF, Mr. Chennithala said the UDF had so far not discussed this issue. “The UDF is headed by the Congress and we are of the opinion that there is no need Mr. Chennithala termed as unjustifiable the decision of the Left Democratic Front to go for a hike in water tariff despite the Rs.1,850-crore budgetary support given to the Kerala Water Authority (KWA). He said the water tariff hike was being imposed on the people to cover up the inefficiency of KWA and the LDF Ministry.

Mr. Chennithala said that the LDF should explain why it put in cold storage for two years the Oommen Chandy government’s proposal for reservation in government colleges for economically backward sections in the forward community. In reply to a question on the CPI(M)-sponsored amusement park, Mr. Chennithala said the CPI(M) had emerged as a commercial entity and finally come around to accepting the realities of neo-liberal economic policies.

How the party could justify the use of 25,000 litres of water a day for the amusement park even while imposing a water tariff hike on the people, he asked.

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