3 min readNew DelhiUpdated: Mar 21, 2026 03:45 AM IST
The Centre on Friday informed the Supreme Court that ex-attorney general K K Venugopal and former SC judges, Justice Indu Malhotra and Aniruddha Bose, will be part of an expert panel, being set up on the top court’s direction, to review the chapter on “corruption” in the judiciary in the NCERT social science textbook for Class 8.
Solicitor General Tushar Mehta conveyed this to a three-judge bench presided over by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant and comprising Justices Joymalya Bagchi and Vipul M Pancholi, which took up for hearing a PIL questioning comments on an SC judgment in older NCERT textbook.
“We have appointed a committee. As a jurist, we requested, and he has accepted, Mr K K Venugopal. He will be a member of the committee in drafting the chapter. Justice Indu Malhotra would be the judge. We have requested Justice Aniruddha Bose, as Judicial Director, to be kind enough to associate,” Mehta told the bench. Justice Bose is currently the director of the National Judicial Academy, Bhopal. Mehta said a vice-chancellor would also be there in the committee.
The apex court had taken suo motu cognizance of the matter following a report in The Indian Express on February 24 and ordered a ban on “further publication, reprinting or digital dissemination of the book”. The NCERT has also issued an unconditional apology.
Hearing the matter on March 11, the SC had said it was “disturbed” by NCERT’s statement in its affidavit that the chapter “has been duly rewritten” and “the revised chapter shall be incorporated in the forthcoming academic session 2026-2027”.
“Owing to the perturbing stand taken by the Director, NCERT… regarding ‘rewriting’ of the offending chapter, we direct that if at all, Chapter 4 of the textbook has been rewritten, the same shall not be published until it is approved by a committee comprising domain experts,” the court said.
It asked the Centre to “constitute such a committee of domain experts, preferably including a former senior judge, an eminent academician and a renowned practitioner in law”.
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On Friday, former NCERT member Pankaj Pushkar moved a PIL against an older social science textbook of Class 8 for the year 2015-16 that said “recent judgments tend to view the slum dweller as an encroacher in the city”. The petitioner contended that it would influence the minds of the children studying it.
The top court refused to entertain the petition, observing that the judiciary should not be oversensitive about a healthy criticism. CJI Kant said people are entitled to have their own opinions about a judgment.
“It’s a viewpoint about a judgment. That’s a healthy criticism. Why the judiciary should be so oversensitive about that? This part of the book points out what is the structure of the judiciary, how they work, what they have done, some good has also been highlighted. Then they say however there are also Court judgments that people believe work against the best interests of common persons…This is a viewpoint about a judgment. It’s only a perception…people have a right to criticize our judgments,” he said.
Mehta said that “perception that an uninformed person may have from a judgment can never be the concern of the judiciary”.
