Fact Check: School Book Chapter About Using Head For Carrying Weight Is Unrelated To Bihar Board

New Delhi (Vishvas News) A viral social media post is claiming that a chapter in a Bihar board book has linked the function of a person’s head with carrying the load. The post claims that this is an attempt by the Bihar government to implant the idea that children are “labourers”.

Vishvas News conducted an investigation and found that this particular chapter does not belong to any Bihar board book. Instead, it is found to be from a book in Ghana, Africa.

What’s Going Viral?

On October 2, a Facebook user named Adv Pradeep Gautam shared the viral post. The post included an image of a page from a book that explains the functions of different body parts. It featured a drawing of a child with text suggesting that the head’s function is to bear a burden. The user’s caption reads, “Bihar govt is teaching this in the textbook. The function of the Head: For Carrying Load. So, Bihar govt putting in children’s minds that you are ‘LABORER.'”

The archived version of this post can be accessed here.

Investigation

To investigate this post, we first checked this image with Google Lens. We found that this photo had appeared in many Facebook posts in 2016, with claims that its origin was Africa.

Subsequently, we used keywords to search for relevant information and came across a news article published on April 1, 2016, on Pulse.com, a local website in the African country Ghana. The article reported that the Ghana Education Service faced criticism for including the classification of the human head as a part of the body used for carrying loads in a textbook. The book in question was identified as ‘Natural Science for Primary Schools – Pupil’s Book 1’, authored by Joseph Albert Quarm.

Further follow-up articles related to this story were also published on Pulse.com.

We also found a news article about this chapter of the book published on Ghanaweb.com on April 5, 2016.

Since the post claims that this is from Bihar, we reached out to Neeraj Kant, a reporter for Dainik Jagran in Patna, who covers education topics. According to  Kant, the image does not come from any Bihar board book. If it did, there would have been discussions or notices regarding it, but no such information had come to his attention.

This social media post was shared by a Facebook user named Adv Pradeep Gautam. According to the user’s profile, Adv Pradeep Gautam is a lawyer at the Delhi High Court and has more than 5,000 followers on Facebook.