New NCERT Class 6 social science textbook shrinks content, rolling three books of history, geography, civics into one

New Class 6 Social Science textbook combines History, Geography, and Civics into one concise volume.

The new Social Science textbook for Class 6 is a heavily truncated amalgamation of what was earlier three separate books for History, Geography, and Civics published by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT).

Students in Class 3 and Class 6 are getting new textbooks for the 2024-25 academic year. Class 6 students will get a single Social Science text, titled Exploring Society — India and Beyond.The Hindu had earlier reported that the National Syllabus and Teaching Learning Material Committee was considering merging three books into one.

The heavily truncated new Social Science book has one entire chapter (Chapter 5: India, that is Bharat) dedicated to a discussion of the etymology of the term ‘Bharat’, citing references from ancient Indian texts like the Mahabharata, described as one of India’s most famous works, and the Vishnu Purana. Citing the Mahabharata, it says: “Interestingly, it lists many regions, such as Kāshmīra (more or less today’s Kashmir), Kurukṣhetra (parts of Haryana today), Vanga (parts of Bengal), Prāgjyotiṣha (roughly today’s Assam), Kaccha (today’s Kutch), Kerala (more or less today’s Kerala), and so on.” The text also features many Sanskrit terms along with diacritics, the accents used over letters to encourage the correct pronunciations of Sanskrit words.

The new textbook is structured around five themes. The first theme comprises 34 pages dedicated to Geography and includes two chapters: Oceans and Continents, and Landforms and Life, which starts with a quote from the Atharva Veda. Concepts such as measuring longitude and latitude of the globe have been culled from the current version. The total pages dedicated to geography have been brought down from 48 to 34 pages.

The second and third themes on ‘Tapestry of the Past’ and ‘Our Cultural Heritage and Knowledge Traditions’ consist of 46 pages with five chapters of History. These have been heavily cut from the ten chapters in the older NCERT text. Chapter 4 is titled ‘Timeline and Sources of History’, while Chapter 5 is about the origins of the term ‘Bharat’.

Chapter 6 on ‘The beginning of Indian Civilisation’ starts with a quote from the late B.B. Lal, a former Archaelogical Survey of India chief who had led excavations at the Babri Masjid site in the mid-1970s and said there was no trace of any Hindu temple at the site; ten years ago, however, he said there were temple pillar bases at the site. He also studied the Indus Valley and the Hindu epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, and is quoted in the book referring to the Harappan civilisation as the Indus-Sarasvati or Sindhu-Sarasvati civilisation. The chapter emphasises Dholavira, a Harappan site in Gujarat, and uses a cover image of the north gate leading to Dholavira’s castle area; in the old textbook, the cover featured a picture of Mohenjodaro, a Harappan site located in modern-day Pakistan.

The seventh chapter, titled ‘India’s cultural roots’, has an extended commentary on the Vedas. While the older text featured one story from the Upanishads — ‘Chhandogya Upanishad’ — the new book has two additional stories from the ‘Katha Upanishad’, and the ‘Brihadaranyaka Upanishad’. An 18th century painting depicting a scene from the Ramayana has also been included.