NCERT drops texts on Gandhi for Class 12

NEW DELHI: “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” are among the portions missing from the Class 12 political science textbook for the new academic session.

The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), however, claims no curriculum trimming has taken place this year and the syllabus was rationalised in June, last year.

As part of its “syllabus rationalisation” exercise last year, the NCERT, citing “overlapping” and “irrelevant” as reasons, dropped certain portions from the course including lessons on Gujarat riots, Mughal courts, Emergency, Cold War, Naxalite movement, among others from its textbooks.

A text reading, “Communal Politics began to lose its appeal” in reference to the time after Gandhi’s death in 1948 was also removed from the textbook.

The rationalisation note had no mention of 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, however, did not comment on the missing excerpts which went unannounced at the time of rationalisation.

A note by NCERT on its website reads, “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. NCERT had undertaken the exercise to rationalise textbooks across all classes”.

“The present edition is a reformatted version after changes. These textbooks were rationalised for 2022-23 and will continue in 2023-24,” it adds.

Among reasons cited behind the choice of dropped subjects are content based on genres of literature; reducing the curriculum load and exam stress in view of the prevailing condition of the pandemic; content.↔ More on P7