Book row: First 2 chapters of history books of Pb Board ready for 12th standard

The oversight committee, set up by the Punjab government to rectify the flaws in history books, has prepared two chapters of history for Class 12th and one chapter of secondary level, an official statement said.

A meeting was held here today under the chairmanship of Punjab Education Minister Om Parkash Soni in which the committee showed him the chapters prepared by them.

The chapters would be translated in Punjabi and Hindi in a few days and uploaded on the Education Board's website on August 1.

The minister said the preparation of the history book was a big task which required a lot of time but the state government and the Punjab School Education Board had urged the committee to expedite the process so that the students' studies were not affected.

During the meeting, the chairman of the committee, a renowned historian Kirpal Singh, said the committee had divided these chapters period-wise, it said.

As part of this, Indian history would be studied in secondary level from the early period to 1947 and the history of Punjab would be from 1450 to 1966 in the higher secondary level, the statement said.

Over two months ago, Chief Minister Amarinder Singh had announced the constitution of a six-member oversight committee to examine the recommendations of the 2014 panel that reviewed the history syllabus and oversee all history books in the future.

The move came in the wake of opposition Shiromani Akali Dal alleging that a major portion of Sikh and Punjab history had been removed from the Class 12 curriculum.

The Punjab School Education Board (PSEB) and the Congress government had earlier maintained that the curriculum was only "re-aligned" to match the NCERT syllabus.

The oversight committee also included former vice chancellor of Guru Nanak Dev University J S Grewal, former pro-vice chancellor of GNDU Prithipal Singh Kapur, emeritus professor of history at Panjab University, Indu Banga.