New Delhi, 15th June 2023: Concerning the substantive alteration of the original National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) textbooks, 33 academicians on the textbook creation committee urged the council on Wednesday to remove their names from the current textbooks.
This comes only days after two former NCERT consultants, Yogendra Yadav and Suhas Palshikar, resigned from the ‘rationalised’ political science textbooks.
The 33 political scientists who were members of the textbook development committee for books drafted in 2006-07 based on the 2005 version of the National Curriculum Framework (NCF) and are currently in use said in a letter to NCERT director Dinesh Prasad Saklani on Wednesday that NCERT’s recent rationalisation exercise has “harmed their creative collective effort.”
Pratap Bhanu Mehta, former vice-chancellor of Ashoka University and political scientist, Radhika Menon of Delhi University, Nivedita Menon of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Kanti Prasad Bajpai, Vice-Dean of National University Singapore, and former JNU professor Rajeev Bhargava were among those who signed.
“We are now led to believe that this collaborative creative effort is in peril…”With great regret at this turn of events, we, therefore, request that our names, as members of the Textbook Development Committee, be removed from NCERT’s political science textbooks,” they said.
Their letter to NCERT came amid a debate over the removal of several topics from the 2022 syllabus, including passages on evolution theory, references to the Cold War, Mughal courts, and the industrial revolution, the 2002 Gujarat riots, agriculture’s contribution to the Indian economy, and a section on challenges to democracy.
