Defence Minister Rajnath Singh has made a fresh pitch for Vedic Mathematics, saying he would urge Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath to make it compulsory for all children in the state if the BJP returns to power in next year's Assembly election.
Speaking at a Sant Sammelan in Ayodhya on Monday, Singh said traditional learning had to be tied to modern needs. "We need students who understand Sanskrit shlokas as well as computer code," he said.
Singh said no method matched Vedic Mathematics for solving difficult problems. He recalled introducing it into the state syllabus in 1991 as UP's education minister, and claimed it is taught at the London School of Economics.
The remarks come as Vedic Mathematics is being introduced in schools and universities as part of the Centre's Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) programme. Its origins, however, remain contested.
What is Vedic Mathematics?
Vedic Mathematics is a system of mental-calculation shortcuts built on 16 sutras, or word-formulae, and 13 sub-sutras. Each sutra is a terse Sanskrit phrase — "by one more than the one before", "all from nine and the last from ten" — that stands in for a calculation procedure.
The methods exploit patterns in numbers: closeness to a round base such as 10 or 100, or a final digit of 5. Done right, a multiplication that takes several lines on paper can be finished in one, or in the head. The system covers multiplication, division, squares, square and cube roots, and simple equations.
These examples show how it works:
35 × 35 (Ekadhikena Purvena, "by one more than the one before"): multiply 3 by the next number, 4, to get 12. Attach 25. Answer: 1,225.
97 × 96 (Nikhilam, "all from nine, the last from ten"): each is short of 100 by 3 and 4. Subtract crosswise, 97 − 4 = 93; multiply the shortfalls, 3 × 4 = 12. Answer: 9,312.
23 × 41 (Urdhva-Tiryagbhyam, "vertically and crosswise"): 2 × 4 = 8; (2 × 1) + (3 × 4) = 14; 3 × 1 = 3. Combine 8, 14, 3 with carries. Answer: 943.
The tricks are valid arithmetic.
Mathematician SG Dani of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, who has done most to debunk the system's Vedic label, accepts they work: the first, he notes, relies simply on 5 being half of 10.
Where did it come from?
Despite the name, Vedic Mathematics is a 20th-century work. It is the creation of Bharati Krishna Tirtha (1884–1960), Shankaracharya of the Govardhana Matha in Puri.
Tirtha said he reconstructed the sutras between 1911 and 1918, after years of solitary study in a forest, from an appendix (parishishta) of the Atharvaveda. He never identified the text.
His disciples said he wrote 16 volumes, one per sutra, and that the manuscripts were lost. A single introductory volume, written in 1957, was published as Vedic Mathematics in 1965, five years after his death.
What scholars say
The historical connection between Tirtha's sutras and the Vedas remains a subject of scholarly debate. Mathematician K S Shukla of Lucknow University asked Tirtha to identify the sutras in a standard edition of the Atharvaveda. Tirtha maintained that they appeared in a different version of the text.
V S Agrawala, who edited Tirtha's book, also noted in his foreword that the Vedic origin could not be established from the available texts. He suggested that the connection could be understood through the broader idea that the Vedas contain knowledge.
Researchers including SG Dani and Kim Plofker have examined the mathematical material in the book in this context. They have pointed to the use of concepts such as decimal fractions and later mathematical developments as questions for the claim that the methods date to the Vedic period. Sanskrit scholars have also examined the language of the sutras and identified it as modern Sanskrit rather than Vedic Sanskrit.
This does not mean that mathematics was absent from ancient India. The Vedic period has its own documented mathematical tradition. The Sulba Sutras, generally dated to around 800-500 BCE, contain geometric rules used in the construction of fire altars, including the relationship now known as the Pythagorean theorem. These texts belong to a much earlier mathematical tradition and are distinct from the system presented in Tirtha's Vedic Mathematics.
Why is Rajnath Singh pushing it?
For the Defense Minister, this is a 35-year-old cause. A former physics lecturer at KB Post-Graduate College in Mirzapur, he became UP's education minister in 1991 in the Kalyan Singh government. The Ministry of Defence's profile of him lists two landmarks from that stint: the Anti-Copying Act and Vedic Mathematics in the syllabus.
He has framed the subject as part of a larger argument about heritage and decolonisation. In a 2015 convocation speech at Sharda University, he said he had introduced it despite resistance from those who preferred a Western education system, and blamed British colonialism for India losing sight of its past achievements.
In Ayodhya, he made the case in terms of relevance rather than nostalgia. The best way to preserve a tradition, he said, is to connect it to the needs of the present; being modern means solving the problems of one's time, not merely using new technology or speaking English.
His appeal to Adityanath was explicitly tied to the chief minister's return to power, with UP due to vote in early 2027.
What is the government doing to promote it?
There is no national mandate to teach Vedic Mathematics in schools. Education is on the Concurrent List, so adoption has come state by state. The Centre's role has been to provide policy cover and funding, chiefly through the Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) agenda of the National Education Policy 2020.
The Ministry of Education set up an IKS Division in October 2020, housed in AICTE, to fund research and teacher-training centres. The UGC now allows 5% of undergraduate and postgraduate credits to come from IKS courses.
In a written reply to the Rajya Sabha in July 2025, Minister of State for Education Sukanta Majumdar said seven UGC-funded universities — among them Delhi University and BHU — run Vedic Mathematics courses. Rs 2.61 crore had been sanctioned over three years for work on Indian mathematical traditions.
In schools, NCERT's new middle-school textbook, Ganita Prakash, draws on the history of Indian mathematics but contains no Vedic Mathematics. Uttar Pradesh is adding it to its own editions for Classes 6 to 8. Teacher-training workshops under Samagra Shiksha have been held in Delhi, Sikkim, Manipur and Assam.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi also urged parents to teach it to their children in a 2022 edition of Mann Ki Baat.
How is it different from the maths taught in school?
It is not a different mathematics. The answers are identical; only the route changes.
School mathematics teaches general methods that work for any numbers, and builds towards algebra, geometry, calculus and proof. Vedic Mathematics offers special-case shortcuts: the trick for 97 × 96 works because both numbers sit just below 100, and gains little on 47 × 63. Its strengths are speed on suitable numbers and quick ways to check an answer. It does not explain why the methods work, which is what the school syllabus is built to do.
The abacus, often bracketed with it, is different again: a bead frame used with children aged roughly 4 to 12 to build a feel for place value, later practised as mental visualisation. Vedic Mathematics is typically taught from age 10, and is popular with candidates for speed-based exams such as CAT, banking and SSC tests.
Similar speed systems exist elsewhere — most famously the Trachtenberg system, devised by Jakow Trachtenberg while imprisoned in Nazi camps. Writer Alex Bellos has pointed out that several of Tirtha's methods appear in early modern European arithmetic manuals.
Most educators who back it agree on one point: it can supplement the regular syllabus, not replace it.
Do other countries have their own mathematics?
Every civilisation developed its own ways of counting, measuring and calculating — a field of study known as ethnomathematics, a term popularised by the Brazilian educator Ubiratan D'Ambrosio. The underlying mathematics is universal; the number bases, notations and tools differ.
Mesopotamia counted in base 60, which is why an hour has 60 minutes and a circle 360 degrees.
The Maya used base 20 and had a symbol for zero.
China calculated with counting rods; its classic Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art worked with negative numbers early.
Japan developed the soroban abacus and wasan, a native tradition whose geometry problems were hung as tablets in temples.
The Inca kept census and tax records on khipu, knotted cords.
The Yoruba of West Africa count in base 20 and lean on subtraction: 45 is expressed as "five from fifty".
The Yuki of California counted in base 8, using the spaces between fingers.
Beyond the Sulba Sutras, India gave the world the decimal place-value system and zero as a number, formalised by Brahmagupta in 628 CE. In the 14th century, Madhava and the Kerala school produced infinite series for sine, cosine and π, some 250 years before Newton and Leibniz.
Why do critics object?
Supporters say the methods ease the fear of mathematics, sharpen mental arithmetic and make the subject engaging. Critics object less to the tricks than to the label, and to public money spent promoting it.
Dani has argued that the book reduces mathematics to a bag of tricks with no conceptual grounding, and that state funding for it should be limited while genuine Vedic scholarship is neglected. Astrophysicist Jayant Narlikar, in The Scientific Edge (2003), described the sutras as a red herring with no primary Vedic source. In 2020, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen said exaggerated claims about Vedic Mathematics had created a world of fantasy in some educational institutions, and placed India's mathematical golden age in the first millennium CE.
In 2001, an NCERT proposal to bring Vedic Mathematics and Vedic astrology into mainstream curricula was shelved after opposition led by mathematicians.
Whether it expands further in schools today will depend on how states and educational institutions choose to incorporate it, and how they distinguish its calculation methods.
