The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has excluded major texts like "Gandhiji's death had magical effect on communal situation in the country", "Gandhi's pursuit of Hindu-Muslim unity provoked Hindu extremists" and "Organisations like RSS were banned for some time" from the Class XII Political Science textbook for the new academic session, stated a report by PTI.
NCERT rejects the claims by asserting that there was no trimming of the curriculum that happened this year and the rationalisation of the syllabus was done in June last year. In this process, certain portions from the course like the Gujarat riots, Mughal courts, Emergency, Cold War and Naxalite movement were dropped by NCERT, for which, the reasons they cited were "overlapping" and "irrelevant". The note on rationalisation did not mention excerpts about Mahatma Gandhi.
"The entire rationalisation exercise was done last year, there is nothing new which has happened this year," NCERT Director Dinesh Saklani said. He did not comment on the missing excerpts which went unnoticed during syllabus rationalisation.
Reasons NCERT says
NCERT website has a note which says that, "in view of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was felt imperative to reduce content load on students. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 also emphasises reducing the content load and providing opportunities for experiential learning with creative mindset. In this background, the NCERT had undertaken the exercise to rationalise the textbooks across all classes and all subjects.The present edition is a reformatted version after carrying out the changes. The present textbooks are rationalised textbooks. These were rationalised for the session 2022-23 and will continue in 2023-24."
The topics which seemed to be “irrelevant” and contents which children can acquire knowledge without the involvement of teachers and can be learnt on their own or through peer learning were also avoided in the present text.
An anonymous official from the ministry stated that they are still working on the new textbooks as per the curriculum framework of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 and it’ll only be introduced from the 2024 academic session.
