‘Modern Indian History Should Start From 2014’

As part of its “syllabus rationalisation” exercise last year, NCERT had dropped certain portions from the syllabus, including lessons on Mughal courts, from its Class 12 textbooks, stating they were “overlapping” and “irrelevant”.

New NCERT textbooks revised in accordance with the new National Education Policy (NEP) are likely to be introduced in schools from 2024-25 academic session, Education Ministry officials said last month. The textbooks will be developed in accordance with the National Curriculum Framework (NCF).

“The new textbooks are likely to be introduced from 2024-25 academic session. It is a tall task but we are aiming for that. The textbooks will be revised as per the new NCF, work on which is already going on. Developing textbooks is a laborious task,” a senior MoE official said.

Meanwhile, it was reported earlier that Uttar Pradesh government schools will adopt from this academic session the NCERT’s new Class 12 history textbooks in which portions about Mughal courts have been removed.

“We teach our students using NCERT books…whatever is there in the revised edition will be followed,” Deputy Chief Minister Brajesh Pathak said. Additional Chief Secretary (basic and secondary education) Deepak Kumar confirmed the development. “We follow NCERT books and whatever is available in the revised edition, we will follow it in state schools from 2023-24 session,” Kumar told PTI.

Many of these changes were announced in early 2022 when the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) rationalised its syllabi in April. Besides schools under CBSE, some state boards also use NCERT textbooks.

Earlier, listing the changes, the NCERT, in a note, had said, “The content of the textbooks has been rationalised for various reasons, including overlapping with similar content in other subject areas in the same class, similar content included in the lower or higher classes on the same subject.”

It also stated that difficulty level, content which is easily accessible to students without much intervention from teachers and can be learned by self-learning or peer-learning and content which is irrelevant in the present context have been removed.

In the Class 12 political science textbook, pages on the topic ‘Gujarat Riots’ have been excluded from the chapter titled ‘Recent Developments in Indian Politics’. The mention of the National Human Rights Commission report on the 2002 violence and the “raj dharma” remark by then Prime Minister Atal Bihar Vajpayee has been dropped from the textbook.

Also, chapters on Mughal courts in a history textbook, a poem on the Dalit movement and a chapter on the Cold War, are among the exclusions from the political science textbook.