Kerala CM to release textbooks with syllabus deleted by NCERT on August 23

As part of its "syllabus rationalisation" exercise last year, the NCERT, citing "overlapping" and "irrelevant" as reasons, dropped certain portions from the course.

Thiruvananthapuram: The state government on Wednesday said that it will release additional textbooks for standards 11 and 12 with the syllabus that was removed by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT). The announcement was made by State General Education Minister V Sivankutty and said that the additional textbooks will be released on August 23. 

The Minister said that Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan will release the textbooks at the Government HSS for Girls, Cotton Hill, Thiruvananthapuram. The minister stated that Kerala will not be impacted by the NCERT's removal of topics from the textbooks of those grades because the state used its own textbooks from first grade to tenth grade.

The omission of substantial portions from the NCERT textbooks, which the state utilises for classes 11 and 12, is not acceptable, he asserted.

The minister explained the conditions that led the state to publish new textbooks and added that the state could not allow the omission of any of them from humanities subjects like history, sociology, political science, and so forth. Though textbooks should be renewed in accordance with the time, no change can be made in the country's history, constitutional values, and so on, he said in a statement.

Kerala would reject any similar action in the future, the minister added. 

As part of its "syllabus rationalisation" exercise last year, the NCERT, citing "overlapping" and "irrelevant" as reasons, dropped certain portions from the course, including lessons on Gujarat riots, Mughal courts, Emergency, Cold War, Naxalite movement, among others from its textbooks.  The rationalisation note had no mention of excerpts about Mahatma Gandhi.

Earlier, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said that the decision to exclude chapters and sections from NCERT's Class 12 political science textbooks is not only a denial of history but also objectionable. He said that historical facts cannot be rejected by eliminating from textbooks what is inconvenient to them.