The Kerala government has introduced additional textbooks of the State Council for Educational Research and Training (SCERT) which incorporates the topics that were recently deleted from the NCERT textbooks.
The textbooks were released on Wednesday by chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan who said that his government’s stand is that NCERT ought not to have excluded those chapters in the name of rationalisation.
“For the year 2023-24, in the name of rationalisation, some important changes were made in the books prepared by NCERT. Change means some chapters were fully excluded. Our state and government views it very seriously as we believe those chapters excluded are chapters that should have never been excluded,” Vijayan said.
The chief minister said that in grades 11th and 12th, 12 subjects with 44 textbooks are from NCERT. Naturally, students of 11 and 12 are getting textbooks prepared by NCERT with vested interests, he alleged.
“What is the danger due to this? It will change the way children view society and history. A generation that is full of prejudices and lacks the sense of humanity will be moulded. It will endanger our secular thinking and fraternal society. It is with this realization that the state government has come forward with such an alternative approach,” he said.
Furthermore, chief minister Vijayan said NCERT claims that its reason for making changes in textbooks is to reduce the burden of textbooks and the rationalisation is based on suggestions by experts. However, the council has not even revealed who these experts are, he added.
With inputs from PTI