"Such mistakes could happen during the printing and binding works as the publishing houses have to print a large number of books," NCTB Chairman Prof Dr Gazi Md Ahsanul Kabir said in a reaction to a report carried in The Daily Star yesterday.

The chairman claimed he did not find such errors mentioned in the report after scrutinising some of the books.

He gave example of a book published by the Oxford Publishing Company that also contains such faults.

Regarding a disorganised chapter on incurable diseases in General Science textbook, which suddenly breaks at page 17 and starts at page 257, the chairman said, "The sudden break took place as we received the additional part of the chapter much later."

Meanwhile, sources said many teachers, especially outside the capital, do not believe that there could be any error in the NCTB textbooks.

Rather they try to establish the wrong or misleading information when students find out and place the issues before them.

"How could there be an error in a textbook? I didn't find any error in any book," said a teacher of 50 no. Dairy Farm Govt Primary School, declining to mention her name without permission of the upazila education officer.

Books published for primary level students also contain hazy conception about several issues including AIDS and independence, sources said.

Errors in punctuation uses in Bangla books and wrong meanings of the words in English textbooks of primary students are also found very often, the sources added.