NEET 2024: Congress leader Jairam Ramesh criticizes NCERT in grace marks controversy

NEW DELHI: Amid the row over the revision of National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) textbooks, Congress leader Jairam Ramesh alleged on Monday that the institution has been functioning as an Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) affiliate since 2014 and is mounting an assault on the constitution.

In a post on X, Jairam Ramesh said the National Testing Agency (NTA) has blamed the NCERT for the 'grace marks' fiasco in the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) 2024. He alleged that this is only drawing attention away from the NTA's own abject failures. "However, it is true that the NCERT is no longer a professional institution. It has been functioning as an RSS affiliate since 2014. It has just been revealed that its revised Class 12 political science textbook criticizes the idea of secularism as well as what it considers the policies of political parties in this regard."

"NCERT's objective is to produce textbooks, not political pamphlets and propaganda," the Congress leader said. "NCERT is mounting an assault on our country's constitution, in whose preamble secularism features explicitly as a foundational pillar of the Indian republic. Various Supreme Court judgments have clearly held secularism to be an essential part of the basic structure of the constitution," he added.

NCERT text books quality: Comments

Jairam Ramesh said the NCERT needs to remind itself that it is the National Council for Educational Research and Training, "not the Nagpur or Narendra Council for Educational Research and Training." He further alleged, "All of its textbooks are now of dubious quality, vastly different from those that shaped me in school."

Trinamool Congress (TMC) leader Saket Gokhale also criticized the NCERT, saying, "The shameless National Democratic Alliance (NDA) 1.0 government" is hiding "inconvenient facts" from students. "By this logic, why teach kids about other 'violent depressing things' like world war?" he asked. "Are the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Modi ashamed of their history as criminals and rioters? Why hide the truth from students?" Gokhale questioned.

Rejecting accusations of saffronization of the school curriculum, NCERT director Dinesh Prasad Saklani said that references to the Gujarat riots and Babri Masjid demolition were modified in school textbooks because teaching about riots "can create violent and depressed citizens."

In an interaction with the Press Trust of India (PTI) editors, Saklani said the tweaks in textbooks are part of the annual revision and should not be a subject of hue and cry. "Why should we teach about riots in school textbooks? We want to create positive citizens, not violent and depressed individuals," he said.

He added, "Should we teach our students in a manner that they become offensive, create hatred in society, or become victims of hatred? Is that education's purpose? Should we teach about riots to such young children? When they grow up, they can learn about it, but why in school textbooks? Let them understand what happened and why it happened when they grow up. The hue and cry about the changes is irrelevant."