It is obvious that the leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are more comfortable with typing than writing. The value of good education is alien to most of them. A series of education scams under the BJP governments tell us where these leaders stand when it comes to recognising the sanctity of wholesome education.We were witness to the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) and the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) scams right under the nose of the Narendra Modi regime. We have also seen how the education mafia in different BJP-ruled states have plundered crores of public money meant for providing value education to school children.The latest example is Odisha where the state government has clandestinely diverted taxpayer’s money to enrich private publishers, if opposition voices are to be believed then most likely in Gujarat, affiliated to the saffron establishment.Look at the cloak of secrecy: the Mohan Majhi government was officially forced to admit that the bulk of the school textbooks – published by the State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) – were given to private printers only when a tsunami of blunders in those books came to the surface.Experts pointed out more than 1,600 egregious errors in the textbooks of class I to class VIII; the Majhi government admitted to 1678 factual, grammatical and spelling inaccuracies and wrong references, with class VIII textbooks alone accounting for 705 grave errors.Sample some of them: Sir Isaac Newton was shown in an aviator’s uniform and introduced as a great pilot in a class VIII science text book; Karnataka assembly building was featured as the Odisha Vidhan Sabha; Niyamgiri Hills, the home of Dongria Kondh tribals in Odisha, was shown as a mountain range of Jharkhand. An image of the iconic stone chariot at Vijaya Vitthala Temple of Hampi in Karnataka was identified as the Konark Sun Temple in Odisha in another textbook. There were numerous blunders in textbooks of mathematics, science and geography subjects as well. Horrendous conceptual errors abounded; one example, equinox was treated as interchangeable with equator. There were some silly errors too; wheat was mentioned as paddy, glass as cup, temperature as pressure, ‘food web’ was mixed up as ‘food cycle’.Berhampur is a city in the district of Ganjam in Odisha but it was identified as a district itself. That’s not all; there were spelling mistakes galore; for example: ‘greatest’ was spelt as ‘gretest’; ‘Dongria’ tribe was mentioned as ‘Dongaria’ tribe. Mughals were mentioned as ‘Gogal’. There were innumerable spelling mistakes involving names of well-known living personalities and historical figures as well.What was indeed most embarrassing was that the popular Bollywood song ‘Nimbuda Nimbuda’ from the 1999 blockbuster Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam featuring Aishwarya Rai was printed verbatim – with Rai’s filmy image inserted in the text – in Odia script in a class V text book under the caption of Rajasthani folk song. The concerned authors had no clue to distinguish between an original folk song and its cinematic rendering. Again, it was equally embarrassing that an Odia festival song Raja Doli was published in Odia script in an English textbook.Here are some interesting gems from some of these textbooks: in the class IV literature lessons, we come to know that Pandava and Kauravas played kabaddi. A class V textbook tells us that famous astronomer Pathani Samantha accurately predicted the day of his death before travelling to Puri to pray to deity Lord Jagannath.Another lesson comes up with a great fiction that a cave in Keonjhar district in Odisha was the birthplace of Lava and Kusha, the twins born to Rama and Sita. The lesson also stresses the popular belief that childless women could conceive by performing rituals there.Also read: ‘Gretest’ Instead of ‘Greatest’, Hampi Instead of Konark: Over 1600 Errors in Odisha’s New TextbooksAnd, lo and behold, a class VI Skill Education textbook has a lesson on preparing ‘Jhal Mudhi’. For the government, of course, it was not a mistake by any reckoning; rather it was a matter of pride that educated young men would learn a skill that would impress Prime Minister Modi; after all, he had halted at a Jhal Mudhi shop during his successful election campaign in West Bengal.No wonder, after these textbooks, with glaring errors, reached the schools across the state, the role of the education mafia deeply embedded in the system came under the lens.A hugely embarrassed chief minister Majhi cried foul about a deep-seated conspiracy against him; he was however quick on his feet to announce that mistakes would be corrected, fresh textbooks would be printed and distributed across the state. But school education minister Nityananda Gond went on record the next day to contradict the chief minister; he and his senior officials insisted that it would not be possible to re-print the text books after carrying out the corrections as it was a time-consuming process to publish around three crore copies for an estimated 40 lakh affected students. Their solution was this: one corrected copy would go to the subject teacher in each affiliated school and they would teach drawing the content from the new textbook.Imagine the conundrum for the little child of class I or even the young kid of class VIII: the text book says something, the teacher explains it as something else. Then the wise government officials suggested a way out – the error-riddled textbooks would be withdrawn from the students and students would be asked to take extensive notes in the class to prepare for the examinations.When this ludicrous decision caused an uproar, the government was again on the back foot; it brushed aside the education minister and reaffirmed the chief minister’s earlier assurance that the revised textbooks would be printed and supplied to the students.While this sordid spectacle was unfolding, some popular YouTubers of Odisha like Kedar Mishra, Satya Prakash Nayak and Nabin Das raised the crucial question: which organisation published these textbooks and how long it had taken them to print almost three crore copies?Nabin Das in fact caused a flutter when he claimed that the Majhi government had outsourced the printing to private parties – despite the extensive printing facility available under the state government – and had ladled out a whopping Rs 375 crore.The government hesitantly issued a clarification: it said that only Rs 21 crore was paid to the private parties for publishing some earmarked textbooks. It was widely believed to be a half-truth.It was then that the state Congress president Bhakta Charan Das threw a bombshell: he demanded that the state government must come clean as to how many textbooks were published in the state facility and how many were outsourced to private parties. He, in fact, charged that the printing work had been outsourced to a company in Gujarat owned by a BJP leader’s son. The Majhi government has not yet responded to the Congress chief’s queries. The intriguing silence has raised considerable speculations: that the printing orders had been given out to Gujarati printers patronised by the Modi-Shah bandwagon.The government is on the horns of a dilemma: if it comes clean and admits that any Gujarati company – or, for that matter, any outside Odisha company – was given the contract, it would face a severe backlash; if it chooses to keep the names hidden, it would only help strengthen the widespread belief that Gujarati contractors are looting Odisha’s exchequer.The BJP had come to power in Odisha in 2024 by its laser-focused campaign against V.K. Pandian, a Tamilian IAS officer who had emerged as the alter ego of then chief minister Naveen Patnaik. Prime Minister Modi had himself orchestrated a campaign that Odisha’s taxpayers’ money was being plundered by the Tamilian agencies patronised by Pandian. That campaign touched a raw nerve of the proud Odias: BJP swept to power ousting Patnaik’s BJD.In the last two years of the BJP regime in Odisha, a deep-seated realisation is gaining ground that Gujarati builders, contractors and businesses are cornering a lion’s share of the state’s contracts. The troubling question for Odiyas is: has Gujarat replaced Tamil Nadu as Odisha’s latest bugbear since the installation of the BJP government in the state?N.R. Mohanty is a senior journalist and a former editor of Hindustan Times, Patna.