New Delhi: NCERT, the apex advisory body of central and state governments, is facing criticism for “rationalizing” school textbooks by removing chapters ‘Kings and Chronicles’ and ‘The Mughal Courts’ from the CBSE medieval history textbooks for Class 12. In school education, today it says it is a professional exercise to help students affected by the epidemic and has no political motive.
“As we explained last year too, there has been a lot of learning loss due to the Covid pandemic and students have been traumatized. It was felt as a responsibility to the society and the nation, to help the stressed students. The content load in textbooks should be reduced,” NCERT director Dinesh Prasad Saklani told NDTV.

He said experts felt that some chapters overlapped in subjects and classes, adding that some sections were removed to reduce the content burden on students.

Mr Saklani said there were no new books and the revisions made last year by the advisory board which had been justified at length last year would continue this academic year.

“A process has been adopted which is completely professional,” he said.

The NCERT director vehemently denied the allegations that the changes were made to suit a particular ideology.

“Textbooks are being rewritten to suit a particular ideology is a completely bogus and baseless argument. Last year, NCERT gave a very detailed explanation about the process and deleted content for three months, so there is no logic in bringing up this debate now. . There is no bias. It is an assumption by certain people. , I don’t know why,” he said.

A number of controversial changes were announced when the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) rationalized its syllabus for the start of 2022 in April. Apart from schools under CBSE, some state boards also use NCERT textbooks.

Listing the changes, NCERT, in a note, said, “The content of the textbooks has been rationalized for various reasons, including similar content in other subject areas in the same class, content being included in lower or higher classes on the same topic.”