Schools in Bihar to teach Vedic maths

Bihar’s education department is soon going to introduce Vedic mathematics in its schools.

The department, through Bihar Education Project Council (BEPC), is soon, on a pilot-basis, going to introduce Vedic mathematics for class 9 and 10 students in 100 schools.

For this BEPC is scouting for teachers, who can double-up as resource persons to train the teachers in Vedic mathematics. The project is being funded by the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) under Rashtriya Avishkar Abhiyan.

The BEPC is scouring its own resources to find out teachers who could teach Vedic mathematics.

It has also sought the help of a portal ‘Teachers of Bihar’, hosted by two government teachers.

“We have a Facebook page ‘Teachers of Bihar-the change makers’, where about 5,000 teachers have joined,” said one of the founding members of ‘Teachers of Bihar’, who is a headmaster at a school in Bhojpur.

“We have requested the teachers who know Vedic mathematics, through our Facebook page, to come forward to volunteer as trainers,” said another founder of the group.

Vedic mathematics is an ancient system of Indian Mathematics which was rediscovered from the Vedas between 1911 and 1981 by Sri Bharati Krishna Tirthaji (1884-1960).

According to his research, all mathematics is based on 16 sutras of word-formulae.

A source at BEPC said that the department was scouting for Vedic mathematics teachers from among its government teachers, who could train more teachers. “It is being started on a pilot- basis in which 100 teachers of Patna will be trained in Vedic maths and the Centre has granted ₹5 lakhs to train the teachers,” it said.

“The craze among the private institutions is for Abacus, a method of fast arithmetic calculations. Some of our teachers are well-versed in Vedic mathematics and they would train the teachers,” it added.