1. Kindly refer to your letter regarding the State Government's decision to permit children in Hoshangabad district to also study the text books of the State Government and use Eklavya's text books as supplementary text books. It is not correct that the State Government has closed the HSTP but it has made its books supplementary.
2. The District Planning Committee of Hoshangabad had passed a resolution demanding that children in Hoshangabad district should also be given the facility to study standard school text books on the ground that children are finding it difficult to transit with ease to higher classes where standard text books and testing methods are used.
3. Eklavya then made a representation to me to have an objective evaluation of the performance of the programme. The Department of School Education reviewed this matter and in the review it was found that there were genuine causes for parental anxiety. Based on this review, it was decided that children in government schools could not be denied the right to access standard text books followed by the state. The Government also decided that Eklavya's text books could continue as supplementary text books for those schools who opted for it.
4. The State Government has also requested Eklavya to consider providing technical support for teacher training to mainstream the lessons from their 30 years long experience. It has also decided to continue support to other useful initiatives of Eklavya like Sawaliram and enhance support to Chakmak. The enclosed background note gives reasons for such a decision. As you may see from the note, we agree that the DPC is a non-expert body and could not be allowed to intervene in the curriculum. However, we would also have to respect the right of the DPC to demand text books that are followed across the state for use in the schools of their district which we feel is their democratic right.
5. Ideally the state ought to have only one common set of text books as is the practice in all other states across the country and such text books ought to be prepared with the best inputs from initiatives like HSTP. We are certainly willing to consider fielding an academic team to elicit the best learning from the text books of HSTP to be incorporated into the text books of the State Government to enrich it and thereby make such a facility available to all the children in the public schooling system in the state. This perhaps best responds to the vision with which HSTP was formulated which was that of attempting to demonstrate a superior methodology for replication.

Yours sincerely,

Digvijay Singh