New Delhi: Political scientists Yogendra Yadav and Suhas Palshikar have reiterated their demand for removal of their names from the textbooks of the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) after the Council emphasised its right to make changes based on copyright ownership.
Yadav and Palshikar have also asserted that they no longer endorse the books.
“Our point is very simple, if they can use their legal right to distort and mutilate the text, we must be able to exercise our moral and legal right to disassociate our name from a textbook that we don’t endorse. If the name of the textbook development committee is there to acknowledge our contribution, as the NCERT claims, then we must be free to decline this generosity,” they said in a statement released Saturday.
In a public letter written to NCERT director Dinesh Sakhlani on Friday, the duo had sought the removal of their names as chief advisors of Political Science textbooks for Class 9 to 12 that were originally published in 2006-07. Both of them were part of the Textbook Development Committee constituted in 2005 to develop the syllabus according to the National Curriculum Framework (NCF).
“If the names of this committee are reported as a matter of record, as claimed in this statement, then it must also be recorded that we do not approve of the present version. The continuation of our names inside the present version of the book creates a false impression of endorsement, and we have every right to dissociate with this insinuation.
“Besides, the two of us are clearly the “authors” of the signed letter that introduces each book. How can we be forced to introduce a textbook that we no longer recognise? Surely, if the NCERT can get experts to make changes as desired, it can publish their names. The NCERT cannot hide behind our names as Chief Advisors,” the statement read.
Sad to see that NCERT has chosen to respond to Prof @PalshikarSuhas and my letter through an unsigned statement.
Even more disappointing that it does not respond to the sole point we had made.
Our response (attached below with NCERT statement) reiterates our basic demand:… pic.twitter.com/j5md6pkJCY
— Yogendra Yadav (@_YogendraYadav) June 10, 2023
Their response came after the NCERT issued a statement late Friday evening asserting its right to make changes based on copyright ownership and adding that the “withdrawal of association by any one member is out of the question,” given that the textbooks are the product of a collective effort.
“The roles of the members of the Textbook Development Committees in various capacities…were limited to advising on how to design and develop the textbooks or contributing to the development of their contents and not beyond this. Textbooks at the school level are ‘developed’ based on the state of our knowledge and understanding of a given subject. Therefore, at no stage is individual authorship claimed, hence the withdrawal of association by any one member is out of the question,” the NCERT statement said.
Ever since the latest school textbooks hit the market this year, the NCERT has been in the news for various reasons. As part of “rationalisation” of syllabus, the NCERT had removed some parts of syllabus from textbooks of class 6 to 12 — portions on Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination and ban on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) from political science textbooks — which created a controversy. The entire exercise was carried out based on an expert committee’s report that came out in June last year.
Though the NCERT said that the rationalisation was done in order to reduce the syllabus burden on children in the wake of Covid pandemic, questions were raised on the nature of chapters deleted.
In April, the NCERT director had said that the deletions might have been part of a “possible oversight” and there was “no ill-intention”, adding that the changes won’t be restored.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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