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Rajasthan BJP Government has replaced western writers by regional writers in the revised textbooks. This is done with the motive to make students understand the subjects easily. Poems of authors like John Keats, Thomas Hardy, William Blake, T S Eliot and Edward Lear were removed from the revised English textbooks. Class 8 textbooks in Rajasthan schools will no more have work by foreign writers. A member of the textbook committee said that those Hindi chapters which had Urdu words were dropped as these were difficult for the students to read and understand.

John Keats' well known poem, On The Grasshopper and Cricket from the Class 7 curriculum has also been removed. Urdu author Ismat Chugtai's short story 'Kamchor' and Hari Shankar Parsai's 'Bus Ki Yatra' has also been omitted. New books have arrived at the state textbook depots in Ajmer, Udaipur, Dausa, Bharatpur and Jaipur and include poems such as 'My First Visit To the Bank', 'The Brave Lady of Rajasthan', 'Chittor', 'Sangita the Brave Girl' and 'The Glory of Rajasthan'. Swami Vivekananda's 'The Song of the Free' and Rabindranath Tagore's 'Where the Mind is Without Fear' are among the additions.

Hardy's 'When I Set Out For Lyonnesse', Eliot's 'Macavity: The Mystery Cat' and Blake's 'The School Boy' have been dropped, from the first lot of revised textbooks.  Last year, in less than three months, Rajasthan had rewritten textbooks from Classes 1 to 12. The books that have arrived include those for Class 8 (Hindi, English, Sanskrit, maths) and Class 6 (English, Hindi, maths). Foreign authors were dropped as part of the education department's directive to the textbook rewriting committee to include content that evokes a sense of pride in the state and the country.

The Rajasthan government is spending around Rs 37 crore on printing new textbooks for Classes 1 to 8 as part of its larger plan to include historical figures such as Maharaja Surajmal, Hemu Kalani and Govind Guru, Maharana Pratap etc in its social sciences content. Satyavrat Samvedi, president of Swayamsevi Shikshan Sanstha, a body of private schools affiliated to the Rajasthan Board of Secondary Board, said: "If all new books are based on the same premise of promoting local region, then we are on a different path from other states. This will result in poor performance of our students in national-level competitions."