Gujarat riots, Mughal courts to be taught in Kerala schools

The NCERT had drawn flak for removing textbook content citing overlapping with similar content, irrelevant portions, or that could be learned by self-learning or peer-learning

The State will likely teach portions on the 2002 Gujarat riots and the Mughal period that had been dropped from Class 12 textbooks by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT).

The NCERT had conducted a syllabus rationalisation exercise for Classes 6 to 12 in the wake of COVID-19 and in tune with the National Education Policy.

However, unlike Classes 6 to 10 for which the State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) brings out its own textbooks, in Classes 11 and 12, NCERT textbooks are taught for subjects such as History, Political Science, Economics, Geography, the Science subjects, and so on.

The NCERT had drawn flak for removing textbook content citing overlapping with similar content, irrelevant portions, or that could be learned by self-learning or peer-learning.

In the wake of this, the SCERT here had embarked on an exercise to determine if the portions dropped by the NCERT should be taught in the State.

In the Class 12 Political Science textbook, pages on the topic ‘Gujarat Riots’ were excluded from a chapter titled ‘Recent developments in Indian politics’. The mention of the National Human Rights Commission report on the violence in Gujarat had been dropped as also a ‘raj dharma’ remark by the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The removed portion had photographs of newspaper reports on the violence too.

However, the SCERT has recommended to the General Education Department that this portion be retained for students here.