'Criminal conspiracy' behind errors in Odisha books, ex-SCERT director arrested

The Odisha Crime Branch on Tuesday arrested former SCERT Director Manoj Kumar Padhy over an alleged criminal conspiracy linked to errors in school textbooks for Classes 1 to 8. Padhy headed SCERT when the books were prepared. This comes after officials detected 1,678 errors across 55 new textbooks, including factual inaccuracies, grammatical mistakes, spelling errors and incorrect references.