On Tuesday, April 25, Kerala Education Department reportedly held a meeting wherein it has been decided by the Communist government that it will not be complying with the revised syllabus of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) in which several topics have been omitted. According to a decision by Kerala’s State Council of Education Research and Training (SCERT), the state government’s school textbooks will now contain the material that NCERT deleted from the curriculum as a part of the syllabus rationalization process.
The State Council of Education Research and Training (SCERT Kerala) will prepare special supplementary textbooks to teach topics omitted from the syllabus by the National Council of Educational Research and Training.
The state government has been asked for approval by the education department to implement the decision. As soon as the government gives its approval, the chapters that were removed from NCERT textbooks can be taught in Kerala schools. The curriculum committee decided that Kerala should teach the portions that were removed, mostly those that related to history.
After getting the go-ahead from the state government, the Education Department plans to introduce supplementary textbooks for classes XI and XII.
Notably, the history, civics, and Hindi textbooks for classes 10th, 11th, and 12th have undergone revisions as a result of NCERT’s rationalization effort. The history book no longer contains some material pertaining to Mughal history. Darwin’s theory of evolution and the Gujarat riots have also been removed. The NCERT books also dropped some portions related to the Emergency, Cold War, the Naxalite movement, RSS ban etc. Additionally, it has been decided to take some poems and paragraphs out of the Hindi curriculum. Whatever modifications have been made to the curriculum have been put into effect as of the current academic year, 2023–2024.
Ironically, it was the CPM government in West Bengal, which had ordered that there should be no mention of Muslim atrocities in textbooks during their tenure. In 1989, the WB government issued a circular and recommended the deletion of discussions about the medieval period because it was “too controversial.”
Recently, Rajya Sabha Member of Parliament from the Communist Party of India (Marxist) Binoy Viswam, wrote a letter to the Modi government expressing concern about the “deletion of Mughals” from National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) textbooks.