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When a government body responsible for educating 250 million children withdraws a textbook chapter that cited publicly available data, issues a 65-word apology that corrects nothing, and asks citizens to return copies of the book, the question is not whether the judiciary was offended. The question is what kind of knowledge system a democracy has built for itself when an institution powerful enough to take suo motu cognisance in a single afternoon has never once turned that same machinery toward the many other things that have quietly disappeared from these textbooks.

The apology reads as follows:

“The Director and Members of NCERT hereby tender an unconditional and unqualified apology for the said Chapter IV. The entire book has been withdrawn and is not available.”

This is the complete public statement issued on March 10, 2026 by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), the body entrusted with the education of India’s children. Sixty-five words that identify no specific factual error, make no commitment to what accurate replacement content will say, acknowledge nothing about the process by which the chapter was written, reviewed, approved, printed and distributed, and provide no indication of when students will receive anything in its place. What the apology omits matters as much as what it says.

On February 25, when a Supreme Court suo motu bench first took up the matter,........

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