The Odisha Police’s Crime Branch arrested former SCERT Director Manoj Kumar Padhy on Tuesday in connection with erroneous textbooks for Classes 1 to 8.
The Crime Branch said Padhy was entrusted with overall supervision of the textbook development process under the National Education Policy 2020. He approved print-ready manuscripts without verifying factual, scientific, geographical and pictorial contents.
The lapses led to a wrongful loss of approximately ₹175 crore to the state exchequer. In total, 1,678 mistakes were found across the textbooks, including grammatical and factual errors.
Padhy faces charges under Sections 316(5), 201, 61(2) and 3(5) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023. Four officers were suspended following a probe by a committee headed by Development Commissioner D.K. Singh, while six other employees face disciplinary action.
