Food, Poverty, Inequality Among Topics Removed From NCERT Textbooks

New Delhi: Education in India is going through a major change. So much so that high school students will soon have significantly different textbooks, with several key subjects dropped from textbooks, reported NDTV.

The decision of National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) to do away with chapters under its ‘rationalisation’ move will affect over 134 million students in the age group of 11-18.

Among the changes, Class VI students will no longer learn about food and where it comes from. They will also not read on key elements of democracy and on India’s climate and wildlife.

Class VII students will not learn about the struggle for equality, a chapter that explained factors contributing to various forms of inequality in India.

First announced in May 2022, the cuts were meant to ensure a ‘speedy recovery’ in learning after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Some of the reasons listed by NCERT for dropping the chapters from the curriculum were difficulty level, overlapping content and content irrelevant in the present context.

Democracy and Mughal rule in India have been dropped from Classes VI, IX, X, XI and XII, while chapters on poverty, peace, development, states of matter are no longer a part of NCERT’s Class XI textbooks.

As for Class XII, Gujarat riots, understanding Partition, Cold War and reproduction in organisms are some of the chapters which have been dropped.

The theory of evolution, which has been dropped from Class X science textbook, triggered protests earlier this year with over 1,800 scientists and educators writing an open letter against the move..

The Central government, however, rejected all criticism saying that it’s propaganda.

“Due to COVID-19, rationalisation of courses was going on, to reduce the burden of studies on the child. If a child wants to study, Darwin’s Theory is available on all websites. In Class XII, there is already Darwin’s Theory in the syllabus, so there should not be such false propaganda,” Union Minister of State for Education Subhas Sarkar had said.