Academics criticise NCERT’s recent textbook deletions from school curricula

Academics involved in the past in preparing NCERT syllabuses and textbooks on Friday criticised the national textbook body’s recent deletions from the school curricula as selective and anti-academic, suggesting some of it was driven by “political considerations”.

Anita Rampal, Apoorvanand, Neeladri Bhattacharya and Satish Deshpande said the deletions lacked academic merit and might deprive students of perspective on a range of subjects and concepts, from the socially marginalised to the Mughals, from democratic rights to equality.

At a discussion organised by the Indian Academic Freedom Network on the NCERT’s recent curriculum revisions, they and other speakers highlighted a pattern: the deleted content was mostly about caste, diversity, Islam and the Mughals.

“Any change to the content should be driven by a vision or new principles, (it should not happen) on the basis of political considerations,” Bhattacharya said.

The NCERT has said the changes — which include the removal of evolutionary theory from the Class X science syllabus — have been made to reduce the burden on students, keeping in mind the pandemic-induced learning gap.

Rampal and Apoorvanand said the National Curriculum Framework (NCF), the document that guides the writing of textbooks, and the NCERT textbooks prepared between 2005 and 2008 were focused on pedagogical principles.

However, the concepts of justice, disparity-equality and diversity that had been integrated into the textbooks at the time have been selectively dropped during the revisions carried out in 2022 and 2023, they said.

Rampal, Apoorvanand, Bhattacharya and Deshpande were all involved in the NCERT’s process of drawing up syllabuses and textbooks between 2005 and 2008.

Bhattacharya flagged several specific deletions:

n A part of a box on the “Varnas” has been dropped from the chapter “Kingdoms, Kings and an Early Republic” in the Class VI history book, Our Past-I.

The axed text said: “Some priests divided people into four groups called varnas. According to them each varna had a different set of functions. Shudras could not perform any rituals. Often women were grouped with Shudras. Both women and shudras were not allowed to study the Vedas.”

n The chapter “Weavers, Iron Smelters and Factory Owners”, dropped from the Class VIII history book, Our Past-III, described the condition of the crafts and industries in India during British rule.

“We wanted to include the history of different social groups whose history had not been integrated into the school syllabus (till then),” Bhattacharya, who was chief adviser to the NCERT’s textbook development committee in 2005-08, said.

■ The Class VII history book, Our Past-II, had a two-page table on campaigns and events relating to the Mughal emperors. Both pages have been dropped.

■ Also gone is the chapter “Rulers and Buildings”, which was about engineering skills and architecture during the medieval period and gave details of structures like the Qutb Minar, Kandariya Mahadeva Temple, JamaMasjid, Golden Temple and the Taj Mahal.

■ The chapter “Central Islamic Lands”, dropped from the Class XI history textbook, spoke of the rise of Islamic empires in Africa and Asia and its implications for the economy and society.

“The space given to Muslims, Mughals and Islam has shrunk in the textbooks,” Bhattacharya said.

■ He said that certain content that exposed students to the craft of history writing had been removed. The chapter titled “Kings and Chronicles: The Mughal Courts” examined past writings about the Mughal courts to reconstruct the social, religious and cultural history of the Mughals.

“When you delete the chapter on ‘Kings and Chronicles’, you deprive students of (knowledge of) how history is written,” he said.

■ Deshpande cited the removal of content on Dalits and Adivasis from sociology textbooks.

■ Rajashree Chandra, who teaches political science at Delhi University, flagged the deletion from political science textbooks of content relating to social movements, democratic and welfare rights, and caste and equality.

Rampal criticised the draft NCF prepared by the NCERT, saying it would give students a skewed exposure to the world of ideas.

In the name of interdisciplinary subjects, schoolchildren will have to study assertions relating to the “Indian Knowledge System” that have not been proved yet, she said.