33 more academicians ask NCERT to drop their names from ‘rationalised’ textbooks

Expressing concerns over the substantive revision of the original National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) textbooks, 33 academicians, who were part of the textbook development committee, on Wednesday asked the council to remove their names from the current textbooks.

This comes days after two former NCERT advisors, Yogendra Yadav and Suhas Palshikar, dissociated themselves from the ‘rationalised’ political science textbooks.

In a letter written to NCERT director Dinesh Prasad Saklani on Wednesday, the 33 political scientists, who were members of the textbook development committee for books drafted in 2006-07 based on the 2005 version of the National Curriculum Framework (NCF) and are currently in use, said that recent rationalisation exercise of NCERT has “jeopardised their creative collective effort”.

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“NCERT is now making changes to the textbooks. These involve deletions of sentences and removal of some sections (even chapters) considered unacceptable with emphasis given to others considered desirable. The decision of who decides what is unacceptable and what is desirable has been kept rather opaque, violating the core principles of transparency and contestation that, we believe, underlies academic knowledge production.” read the letter.

“Since there are several substantive revisions of the original texts, making them thereby different books, we find it difficult to claim that these are the books we produced and to associate our names with them,” the academicians added.

The signatories included former vice-chancellor of Ashoka University and political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Delhi University’s Radhika Menon, Nivedita Menon of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Kanti Prasad Bajpai, National University Singapore Vice-Dean, and former JNU professor Rajeev Bhargava, among others.

“We are now given to believe that this creative collective effort is in jeopardy…With great regret at this turn of events we, therefore, request you to delete our names, as members of the Textbook Development Committee, from the political science textbooks of NCERT,” they said.

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Last Thursday (June 8), Yadav and Palshikar, who were the chief advisor of the textbook development committee at the same time wrote to the NCERT alleging that the rationalisation exercise has “mutilated textbooks beyond recognition and rendered them academically dysfunctional”.

Their letter to NCERT came amid a controversy over the removal of several topics from the syllabus in 2022, including passages on the theory of evolution, references to the Cold War, the Mughal courts, and industrial revolution, the 2002 Gujarat riots, the contribution of agriculture to the Indian economy, and a section on challenges to democracy.

The NCERT last Friday (June 9) issued a statement saying the council has the right to make changes based on copyright ownership and asserted that the “withdrawal of association by any one member is out of the question”.

The council also said that textbook development committees existed only till the textbooks were developed, and “after the textbooks were published by the NCERT, their copyright remained vested with the NCERT independent of the textbook development committee.”

Seeking clarification on NCERT’s question of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), the 33 academicians in their letter said, “You say that NCERT has the IPR on the textbooks. This we accept. It can publish the textbooks as they were produced under the guidance of the chief advisors in as many copies and editions as it wishes. But it is not at liberty to make substantive changes, minor or major, and then claim that the same set of contributors and chief advisors continue to be responsible for the revised text as it now stands.”

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In their letter, the 33 academicians highlighted that the textbooks were the result of extensive deliberations and collaborations among political scientists from various perspectives and ideological backgrounds and intended to spread knowledge about the ideals of India’s freedom struggle, the aspirations of the constituent assembly, the principles of our constitutional order, the role of leaders and movements, the nature of our federal system, the promising and dynamic qualities of India’s democratic republic.