On Monday, 19 December, the Centre informed the Lok Sabha that the National Council of Education Research and Training (NCERT) should include Shlokas from Shrimad Bhagavad Gita and knowledge from Vedas in textbooks in Sanskrit from classes 11th to 12th. Besides, references from Bhagavadgita should be incorporated in NCERT textbooks of classes 6th to 7th.

Annapurna Devi, Minister of State for Education, stated in a written response that the ministry formed the Indian Knowledge System (IKS) Division in the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) in 2020 with the goal of promoting interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary research on all facets of Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS), preserving and disseminating IKS knowledge for further research and societal applications.

Minister Devi stated that NCERT has begun the development of National Curriculum Frameworks (NCF) where inputs from various ministries, departments, states, and union territories are invited from grass root levels. 

She added that the National Education Policy (NEP) 2022, paragraph 4.27, refers to Indian traditional knowledge that is both sustainable and strives for the welfare of all. She also laid emphasis on teaching the world the “Indian way of doing things.”

“To become the knowledge power in this century, we must understand our heritage and teach the world the ‘Indian way’ of doing things,” she asserted.

Notably, the parliamentary panel has also advised the NCERT to incorporate the achievements and sacrifices of “unsung freedom fighters” from all regions of the country including the Northeast.

Additionally, it was suggested that prominent Indian female personalities from various professions be included in NCERT’s “regular books” with their contributions in order to make it “mandatory reading material.”

To no surprise, the move has been criticized by the Congress party and the other opposition parties. The opposition has alleged that the Narendra Modi government is trying to saffronise the Indian education system. 

NCERT curriculum is finally going to change, a move that can undo decades of misinformation

• Modi government has finally started the work on the revision of the National Curriculum Framework (NCF).
• The previous NCFs have failed to remove the colonial shadow from both the education mechanism and curriculum.
• First attempts to bring back the coherency in the Indian Education System were undertaken under the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government.
• Indian students would be reading textbooks that would reflect the self-confidence of an Atma Nirbhar India that seeks to become Vishwaguru in the coming decades. 

After repeated promises and delays, the Modi government had finally started its work on the revision of the National Curriculum Framework (NCF) and appointed ISRO chief K Kasturirangan, head of the drafting committee of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, to lead it.

The operational National Curriculum Framework, which was drafted and implemented in 2005 under the Congress-Communist government, is riddled by leftist biases because a majority of the people in the textbook drafting committee were communists from JNU. 

The committee also includes National Book Trust chairman Govind Prasad Sharma, who has been the president of RSS’s education wing Vidya Bharati, which runs a chain of schools across the country. Sharma is still a member of Vidya Bharti’s central executive committee.

Other members of the committee include National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration Chancellor Mahesh Chandra Pant, IIM Jammu chairperson Milind Kamble, Chancellor of the Central University of Punjab, Bathinda, Prof Jagbir Singh, social activist M K Sridhar, founder-director of Language and Learning Foundation Dhir Jhingran and co-founder and CEO at EkStep Foundation Shankar Maruwada.

The educational curriculum in India has been a point of major controversy in the past. Many claiming that the previous NCFs have failed to remove the colonial shadow from both the education mechanism and curriculum.

The transition of the British East India Company’s rule to the rule of the British crown further magnified the need to introduce a British inclined education system. This education system was used to create human resources required to aid British imperialistic rule over India. Different commissions were set up for this purpose.

T.B. Macaulay, considered to be the forbearer of the western style of education, had indicated the biases that still prevail in Indian Education System. “We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, -a class of persons Indian in Blood and color, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population,” said Macaulay. 

The government tried to correct these biases in NEP and that will be reflected in NCF also. NEP states that elements such as knowledge from ancient India “will be incorporated in an accurate and scientific manner throughout the school curriculum wherever relevant” and that “Indian Knowledge Systems, including tribal knowledge and indigenous and traditional ways of learning, will be covered and included in mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, yoga, architecture, medicine, agriculture, engineering, linguistics, literature, sports, games, as well as in governance, polity, conservation”, and under Dr Kasturirangan, one is sure that the country will an NCF document that will be as sophisticated as National Education Policy, which won praise from people across the political spectrum.

“The Committee will finalise National Curriculum Frameworks after incorporating suggestions received from various stakeholders, i.e., states/UTs and also in the meetings of Executive Committee (EC) and General Body (GB) of the NCERT and Central Advisory Board on Education (CABE),” the statement said. The committee, which will have a tenure of three years, would also “reflect upon the implications of situations such as Covid-19 pandemic” on respective areas for future in drawing up the NCF.

First attempts to bring back the coherency in the Indian Education System were undertaken under the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government. In 2000/01, the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) issued a National Curriculum Framework for school education under the slogan of “Indianize, nationalize and spiritualize”. The framework called for the purging of all foreign elements from the curriculum in state schools. The new policy involved a massive textbook revision. 

The revisions were contested by a petition to the Supreme Court brought by three activists who argued that the NCERT had not followed the correct procedures of consultation with the states and that it had tried to introduce religious teaching, which is forbidden by the constitution. However, the Supreme Court rejected this petition. As soon as Congress took over after the 2004 general elections, it imposed the NCF in 2005. With the new committee, which includes people from a wide range of experience, and most importantly include technologists and scientists, not JNU ideologues, India would get a fair and balanced curriculum. 

In the next few years, the Indian students would be reading textbooks that would reflect the self-confidence of an Atma Nirbhar India that seeks to become Vishwaguru in the coming decades.

References:

opindia.com