New Delhi: Portions about the 2002 Gujarat riots, the Emergency and the Cold War have been removed from Class 12 textbooks by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), in what has been termed as a “syllabus rationalisation” exercise.
Meanwhile, couplets by revolutionary poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz have been dropped from Class 10 textbooks, according to curriculum documents released by the NCERT.
Chapters on Mughal history, references to Dalit writers have also been scrapped.
The revised syllabus will be taught to students from the 2022-23 academic session, which is scheduled to begin in July.
Changes have been made to school texts of all subjects for classes 6 to 12, the council stated in a note released Thursday, which included a list of the deletions. The reasons for the deletions, according to the council, range from “overlapping” to “irrelevance” of content.
This revision is the latest in a series of changes made to school texts across India over the last few months, which some states have defended in the name of the new National Education Policy (NEP).
In its note, the NCERT stated that the content of the textbooks has been rationalised for various reasons — “overlapping with similar content included in other subject areas in the same class”, “similar content included in the lower or higher class in the same subject”, “difficulty level”, “content which is easily accessible to students without much intervention from teachers and can be learned by children through self-learning or peer-learning” and “content which is irrelevant in the present context”.
A senior education ministry official who did not wish to be named told ThePrint, “This is a part of the syllabus rationalisation exercise and has been done very carefully, after a lot of deliberations. Whatever has been removed is either repetitive or not relevant.”
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Content on Mughal history, gender & caste dropped
Portions on the Gujarat riots have been removed from the Class 12 textbook ‘Politics in India Since Independence’. These parts were included in the chapter titled ‘Recent developments in Indian politics’.
Other content removed from the Class 12 syllabus includes a chapter called ‘Mughal Courts’ which was part of the history textbook, as well as a poem titled ‘The Dalit Movement’ and a chapter on the Cold War from the political science textbook.
A chapter titled ‘Central Islamic lands’ and another on the ‘Industrial Revolution’ were also dropped from the Class 11 history textbook.
From the Class 10 book of ‘Democratic Politics-2’, two couplets by Faiz Ahmed Faiz have been removed from the chapter ‘Gender, Religion and Caste’.
Deletions have been made in the Class 7 social science textbook as well — ‘Social and Political Life-2’ — as well. A lot of changes have been made to a chapter about caste and inequality, which mentioned the example of a woman from a lower caste. References to Dalit writer Omprakash Valmiki have also been dropped.
An entire chapter on ‘Struggles of Equality’ — which captures various social movements including protests by fisherfolk in Madhya Pradesh in the 1990s, after the local government gave the contract of fishing in the Tawa reservoir to private contractors — has also been dropped.
(Edited by Gitanjali Das)
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