It’s as hilarious as it is unbelievable.
An Indian Organization has recently introduced an engineering course that teaches students that modern inventions like batteries and aeronautics existed in India thousands of years ago during the Vedic age. How somebody could make claim like that when a simple search on google would reveal otherwise, is beyond us.
The Indian Human Resource Development Ministry (HRD) decided to launch a highly controversial book into the country’s engineering curriculum that makes a joke out history by making claims like the Wright brothers did not really invent the airplane, to brazen claims of Indian scientist discovering gravity way before Isaac Newton was even born.
Called the Bharatiya Vidya Saar, the book is set to be introduced as an optional course in Engineering Colleges in India affiliated with the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE). The book seems to be an attempt in a series of such measures by Narendra Modi’s government to promote pseudoscience pushed by certain Hindu groups.
“Credit for the invention of batteries is given to British scientist Frederik Daniel (sic) and that of electricity to Benjamin Franklin, but Maharishi Agastya in Agastya Sanhita talks about it much before these scientists.”
an Excerpt from the book highlights the above in its “Myths” section.
A professor, who chose to remain anonymous defended the book in these words:
“For ages now, we have been learning how the British invented things because they ruled us for hundreds of years and wanted us to learn what they felt like. It is now high time to change those things and we hope to do that with this course.”
Maybe the entire world got it’s history wrong and needs to learn something from India?