Kerala restores deleted chapters on Gandhi assassination, Gujarat riots, Emergency in NCERT history textbooks

Thiruvananthapuram: The Kerala government has decided to restore the deleted chapters in National Council of Educational Training and Research (NCERT) Class 11 and 12 textbooks relating to Mahatma Gandhi's assassination, the 2002 Gujarat riots and the period of emergency, while distributing the new supplementary textbooks.

The Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan will inaugurate the book distribution program at Cotton Hill School in Thiruvananthapuram on August 23, State General Education Minister V Sivankutty has informed.

“It's a time when the process of curriculum reform has started at the national and state levels. Meanwhile, at the national level, under NCERT's leadership, many sections were deleted from the 6th to 12th standard textbooks. Kerala had quickly responded academically to this. This exclusion has been made in the name of reducing the academic load due to covid but anyone who examines these books will understand that this cut is not to reduce the academic load but to protect some vested interests," V Sivankutty said.

He further said that the state has taken up this discussion by putting national and academic interests first.

"Textbooks for classes 1 to 10 are produced by Kerala. So, the changes made by NCERT in classes 6 to 10 at the national level do not significantly affect Kerala. But in 11th and 12th class, NCERT textbooks are used," he said, adding that the academic community cannot accept the extensive exclusion made in history, political science, economics and sociology textbooks.

Sivankutty further said that there are attempts to hide the basics of the Constitution, the history of the country, avoiding the fundamental problems in the country, and the avoidance of subjects by saying it's not suitable for this era with political motives - mostly in humanitarian subjects and that is why Kerala has decided to release additional textbooks in humanities subjects.

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The minister clarified that this would not be limited to additional reading.

"They will be a proper part of the syllabus and not just complementary readings. Students will have to study them for their exams, because only then would they find the drive to read and understand their history," he explained.

Last year, the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) amended history and social sciences textbooks to remove mentions of the 2002 Gujarat Riots and passages around the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi.

They had also removed the industrial revolution from a Class 11 textbook and some Dalit writers from a Class 7 textbook as part of a new rationalised syllabus for the current academic session.

This June, NCERT also removed the periodic table, democracy and sources of energy from class 10 textbooks. The chapters that have been removed include Charles Darwin on evolution, the origin of life on Earth, and human evolution and heredity as well as the chapter on the periodic classification of elements.

"We can never change the history of the country, the spirit of the freedom struggle and the constitutional values in the name of the curriculum and textbooks should be updated with the times. Whatever the reason, Kerala will always oppose the removal of such parts," Minister V Sivankutty said in the statement.

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