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 has 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.