Edu Ministry asks NCERT to review textbooks every year

New Delhi: The Union Education Ministry has asked the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) to put in place an annual system to review textbooks and make the necessary changes before printing new textbooks ahead of the beginning of every academic session, officials familiar with the development said.

The NCERT publishes new textbooks every year before the beginning of the academic session. While presently there is no fixed mandate in place to review textbooks every year, the Council has been revising and updating content since 2017.

It made major changes in the textbooks between 2022 and 2023 as a part of its syllabus rationalisation exercise in order to reduce pressure of students amid the covid-19 pandemic.

According to senior officials at the Ministry, the council now has been asked to yearly review the content. “The Ministry has told the NCERT that books should be reviewed on a yearly basis. They are soon going to put that system in place. It is important that when a student buys a book ahead of the new session it has to be the updated version of that book,” said an official.

Explaining the rationale behind it, the official said, “NCERT books once published should not remain the same for many years. They should be reviewed every year before printing and if any changes have to be made or some new facts have to be added, they should be included in the books. For instance, topics like Artificial Intelligence (AI) that are evolving. So far, there had been no mandate of yearly review of the textbooks.”

According to the official quoted above, it will take at least two years for all textbooks to be released for all classes in line with the new National Curriculum Framework (NCF). “It means from academic session 2026-27 students across all classes will have new textbooks as per NCF,” the official added.

The NCERT is revising textbooks in line with the new National Curriculum Framework (NCF) released last year as a part of the implementation of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020.

The Council this year released the new textbooks in line with NCF only for classes 3rd and 6th.

The NCERT has this year made some major changes in its History, Political Science and Sociology textbooks and dropped some references to the Babri Masjid, the politics of Hindutva, the 2002 Gujarat riots, and minorities, adding references to abrogation of Article 370, replacing the term “Azad Pakistan” with “Pakistan occupied Jammu and Kashmir (POJK)”, and revised a paragraph defining the Left as those who prefer “state regulation over free competition”.