PUNE, JUNE 6: It has taken Maharashtra’s 67,000 primary schools two years to learn lessons in politically-correct education. So now their textbooks say‘‘Yasmeen and Yashoda are yawning. Hasan helps Hemant, and Faiz has found a fat fish’’.

State-wide feedback trickling in from non-Marathi medium schools, has finally got Fatima, Salman, Aman Ahmad, Yusuf, Roshan, or Eliza to share space, monopolised since June 2000 by Raju, Sonu, Monu, Vishnu or Radha.

In a quiet turnaround to the swadeshi line, where Mary and her lamb were replaced by Meera and her cat, My English Book Three reads: ‘‘A for Aunty, E for Eliza eats eggs and J for Jack who just jumped down.’’

And to root out gender bias, girls play football, ride horses and scurry up trees. Education officials say a list of 63 Maharashtrian names furnished by textbook writers for third grade textbook characters was redrafted to make way for plenty of ‘‘Christian and Muslim’’ names as the textbook is common to schools of all mediums — Hindi, Urdu, Marathi, Gujarati, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada.

Officials, who surveyed 20,000 schools last year, said the decision was based on feedback from children who wondered why only Maharashtrian children figured in the textbooks.

So while neighbouring Gujarat gets flak for its textbooks with a minority bias, Maharashtra is soaking in all the praise. In Maharashtra, ‘‘we call it value education’’ says Sugita Martin proudly.

One of the 15 key resource persons for the project, she says, ‘‘This is the first time maximum weightage is being given to equal treatment to all communities and castes and it was a conscious decision,’’ and points to a printed command: ‘‘Manisha, Mumtaz, come here quickly.’’

There’s more. In a conversation between Ahmad and Sadu, the former says, ‘‘I like Vitthal very much.’’ Or ‘‘Yusuf, Salim and Ganesh, come and stand near the blackboard.’’

‘‘I am Subhash... my father is a farmer’’ on Page 116 is immediately flanked by an illustrated ‘‘I am Fatima... my father is a captain. My mother is a teacher. We are a happy family,’’ on Page 117.