UP Board Adds 50 New Biographies Of Great Personalities In 9th to 12th Syllabus – News18

The Uttar Pradesh Education Board has added 50 new biographies of great personalities in class 9th to 12th books. As per news agency ANI, 50 new personalities include Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, Pandit Deendayal Upadhyay, Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Sarojini Naidu, Bhagat Singh, Gautam Buddha, Mahavir Jain and Swami Vivekanand, among others.

Education Minister of the state, Gulab Devi said these inclusions are a part of strengthening the moral and cultural values of the children who will grow up and take part in nation building. However, Samajwadi Party (SP) led by Akhilesh Yadav criticised the move and asked government to reconsider inclusion of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. The spokesperson of the party Sunil Sajan said that BJP government in Uttar Pradesh should apologise to millions of freedom fighters eulogizing Vinayak Damodar Savarkar who had betrayed their sentiments by apologizing to the British rulers.

Earlier news agency, PTI informed that schools in Uttar Pradesh will adopt revised NCERT textbooks from the current academic session.  Additional Chief Secretary (basic and secondary education) Deepak Kumar confirmed the development. “We follow NCERT books and whatever is available in the revised edition, we will follow it in state schools from 2023-24 session,” Kumar told PTI.

The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) eliminated some topics from the curriculum as part of its ‘syllabus rationalisation’ effort last year, claiming ‘overlapping’ and ‘irrelevant’ as justifications. These topics included lectures on Mughal courts from its class 12 textbooks. When the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) rationalised its syllabus in April 2022, many of these modifications were made public. Some state boards use NCERT texts in addition to those used by CBSE schools.

Listing the changes, the NCERT, in a note, had said, “The content of the textbooks has been rationalised for various reasons, including overlapping with similar content in other subject areas in the same class, similar content included in the lower or higher classes on the same subject.”

In class 12 political science textbook, pages on the topic ‘Gujarat Riots’ have been excluded from the chapter titled ‘Recent Developments in Indian Politics’. The mention of the National Human Rights Commission report on the 2002 violence and the ‘raj dharma’ remark by then Prime Minister Atal Bihar Vajpayee has been dropped from the textbook.