The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) will finally review its books for the first time after they came into being back in 2007. According to reports, the Council’s Department of Curriculum Studies will conduct the exercise.
According to a Times of India report, Hrushikesh Senapaty, Director NCERT, said that this review is necessary in order to make the long-pending updates. He also mentioned that this review process is different from the revision of books and the curriculum framework, which is a big “policy decision” in the hands of the HRD Ministry.
The Council’s school textbooks underwent a major makeover after the NCF was framed in 2005. The NCERT had set up 21 expert committees to review the NCF towards the fag end of the UPA government’s tenure in 2014. However, this was put on the backburner once the NDA came to power.
The exercise is expected to take up to a year. Senapaty also rubbished the reports that claimed that there was a shortage in the supply of NCERT books and said that “there has been a tradition of creating artificial scarcity by private publishers”.
Other than this, Senapaty also underlined how the NCERT books have a distinctive edge over those of private publishers in terms of quality and price, as well as how there is an attempt to emphasise on the Northeast region in these books in order to build sensitivity towards regional diversity.
Notably, the last major change was made to political science textbooks in 2012 when NCERT dropped six ‘offensive’ cartoons from four books meant for Classes IX, X, XI and XII following protests in Parliament.
