‘Deeply troubling.’ Indian scientists slam teaching materials on Moon mission

School guides on Chandrayaan-3 mission promote pseudoscientific claims rooted in religion, critics say

Official educational materials aimed at teaching India’s students about Chandrayaan-3, the nation’s third lunar exploration mission, are drawing sharp criticism from some of the nation’s scientists. The teaching guides contain technical errors, misleading content, and pseudoscientific claims rooted in religious texts, the critics say.

“This is a great disservice to science and technology, to education, and the scientific temper,” says Satyajit Rath, president of the All India People’s Science Network (AIPSN), a network of science organizations that has called on India’s Ministry of Education to withdraw the materials.

The ministry has defended the 10 modules for elementary and high school students. “Mythology and philosophy put forward ideas and ideas lead to innovation and research,” the ministry said in a 25 October statement. The guides, it said, reflect “the whole gestalt of India’s association with sky and space.”

The materials, released in English and Hindi on 17 October by the National Council of Educational Research and Training, a body that sets India’s educational curriculum and textbooks, focus on the Chandrayaan-3 mission, which successfully placed a lander and rover on the Moon in August.

Modules for younger students introduce basic concepts about spaceflight and suggest classroom activities, such as building a paper model of the spacecraft. Those aimed at older students discuss the mission’s technology and scientific goals.

The modules also repeatedly highlight India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, with each containing at least one photo of him. Modi’s leadership “played a crucial role in the triumph of Chandrayaan-3 and landed our country’s name on the surface of the moon,” reads one module.

Several modules also suggest India developed advanced space technologies centuries ago—a concept promoted in recent years by Hindu nationalists. One, for example, suggests the mention of flying chariots and palaces in ancient Sanskrit epics “seemingly reveals that our civilization had the knowledge of flying vehicles.” Other ancient texts and myths, it adds, “contain treasures of scientific knowledge on various disciplines including aeronautics (that can make the younger generation feel proud of the legacy inherited by them and take this knowledge system further for new uses).”

“The claim that mythologies … lead to innovation in research is a deeply troubling one on a variety of levels,” says Rath, who calls the materials “a publicity campaign for a triumphal cultural nationalism that treats facts as disposable.”

The modules also contain glaring scientific mistakes, researchers say, many of which AIPSN listed in a 30 October statement. “They have made simple errors like saying Chandrayaan-2 discovered ice sheets on the surface of the Moon,” when in fact instruments detected only water molecules, says Aniket Sule, a science education specialist at the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. He fears many teachers “are just going to parrot” those errors to their students because they lack scientific training. “Hardly any teacher is in a position to understand the mistakes,” he says, “and correct them while they are explaining in the class.”

Despite such issues, Rath doubts that the ministry will revise the materials. “In this matter,” he says, “I don’t think that there is going to be any course correction.”

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