NCERT drops Gujarat riots, The Dalit Movement poem from Class 12 textbooks

NEW DELHI: The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has dropped sections on “Gujarat riots”, “controversies regarding emergency” and a full chapter on “understanding partition” from Class 12 political science and history textbooks as part of rationalisation of syllabus. It also dropped a poem on The Dalit Movement from the Class 12 text book on Social Change and Developments in India.

The NCERT, on Thursday, released a list of “rationalised content”, that is content which will be trimmed or dropped from textbooks, for Classes 6 to 12. NCERT has been rationalising or reducing syllabus ever since the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted regular classes.

In the “list of rationalised content”, NCERT has dropped the section on Gujarat riots in the chapter titled “Recent developments in Indian politics”. It also dropped a full page of content on the “controversies regarding emergency” in the chapter “The crisis of democratic order”.

Other sections dropped from the political science textbook include a full chapter on “the rise of popular movements” and a full page on “the era of one party dominance”.

In the history textbook, NCERT has dropped a full chapter on “understanding partition (politics, memories and experiences)”. A chapter on the Mughal courts was also dropped from the history textbooks.

A poem on the Dalit Movement in the “Social Change and Developments in India” textbook has also been dropped.

On rationalising textbooks, NCERT said:“In view of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is imperative to reduce content load on students. The National Education Policy 2020, also emphasises reducing the content load and providing opportunities for experiential learning with creative mindset. In this background, the NCERT has undertaken the exercise to rationalise the textbooks across all classes. Learning Outcomes already developed by the NCERT across classes have been taken into consideration in this exercise.”

NCERT said that the rationalisation is done on the basis of “overlapping with similar content”, “difficulty level”, “similar content in lower classes”, “content that is easily accessible to students” and “content that is irrelevant to the present context”.