Hanuman isn’t a cosmonaut: When ministers mix myth with science

In this Culture Project episode, Manish Adhikary dives into Anurag Thakur’s classroom gaffe.

Transcript

00:00Listen up India, this has got to stop.

00:05A sitting MP and former union minister Andrag Thakur walks into a school in Himachal Pradesh

00:09and asks kids a harmless question about space travel.

00:13This is how the children responded.

00:18But the first man to go to space was USSR's Yuri Gagarin in 1961,

00:22eight years before Armstrong landed on the moon.

00:24But what the minister said in response was deeply embarrassing.

00:30Here's a reality check.

00:34Between 2021 and 2023, NCRT quietly dropped Darwin's theory of evolution

00:39and even the periodic table from class 9 and 10 science textbooks.

00:43What started as a temporary syllabus cut during Covid became permanent.

00:47The annual status of education report shows that in class 3,

00:52less than 24% of government school kids could read a class 2 text.

00:57In maths, only 30.7% can do simple division, even in class 8.

01:02After 8 years of schooling, imagine half of our kids can't divide two numbers.

01:06So while classrooms fight for the basics,

01:09ministers are asking whether Hanuman leaked NASA to space.

01:12This is not funny, it's a national liability.

01:15India gave the world zero, the decimal system and ancient astronomy.

01:19That's real pride.

01:20But when we replace science with stories, we're not just embarrassing ourselves,

01:24we're failing the next generation.

01:26Mr. Thakur, if you wanted to spark imagination, you could have said,

01:29picture a mythological hero soaring through space, Hanuman.

01:32That still makes sense.

01:34But facts and faith, they don't belong in the same answer sheet.

01:37Science matters, our future depends on it.

01:40For more no fluff explainers like this one, follow and like our channel

01:43and share this video with friends and family.

01:45I'm Manish Adhikari. Thank you for watching The Culture Project On More.