Controversy around NCERT textbooks’ rationalisation ‘unwarranted’, says JNU V-C

New Delhi: The recent controversy around the rationalisation of NCERT textbooks is “unwarranted”, said JNU vice-chancellor Santishree D Pandit on Friday, asserting that the revised syllabus must include new “discoveries and knowledge”.

Her remarks come a day after a group of academicians, who were part of the textbook development committees of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), wrote to the council demanding that their names be dropped from books as their “collective effort is in jeopardy”.

The recent developments after the rationalisation are part of the cancel culture where a section believes that what they say should be the last word and nobody else have the right to have an opinion, Pandit said.

A couple of days ago, a number of academicians and political scientists like Yogendra Yadav and Suhas Palshikar asked the NCERT to drop their names from textbooks over “several substantive revisions of the original texts”. “The recent controversy on the NCERT textbook is totally unwarranted. The reason being that no book is contributed to a single author,” the JNU V-C said. It is very “unfortunate” that politicians are trying to make rationalisation a political issue, she said.

It is people who rationalise the syllabus, the revision of the syllabus is a must. The last time a revision was done was in 2006 and that cannot last forever. You have to keep changing according to new discoveries and knowledge, she remarked.