Days after two former NCERT advisors, Yogendra Yadav and Suhas Palshikar wrote to the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) asking for their names to be dropped from textbooks, 33 academicians part of the Textbook Development Committee have written to the council saying that recent rationalisation exercise of NCERT has ”jeopardised their creative collective effort”.
NCERT Now Making Changes To Textbooks
”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,” the letter read.
”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,” it added.
The signatories included former Vice-Chancellor of Ashoka University and political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Radhika Menon of Delhi University, Nivedita Menon of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Vice-Dean of National University Singapore Kanti Prasad Bajpai, and former JNU professor Rajeev Bhargava, among others.
Meanwhile, NCERT said that the withdrawal on anyone’s association is out of question as the textbooks at the school level are developed based on the knowledge and understanding of a given subject and at no stage individual authorship is claimed.