The Central Board of Secondary Education on Tuesday deleted chapters on federalism, citizenship, nationalism, and secularism from the political science curriculum of Class 11 for the academic year 2020-’21. The revisions were made as part of rationalising the syllabus in view of the coronavirus pandemic, the board said.
Sub-sections including “why do we need local governments?” and “growth of local government in India” have also been removed from the curriculum. The revised curriculum along with the list of deleted chapters and topics has been uploaded by CBSE on its website.
The political science curriculum for Class 10 students was also restructured to remove chapters on democracy and diversity; gender, religion and caste; popular struggles and movement, among other sections.
These chapters will not be accessed in themselves but teachers have been asked to explain to the students of their relevance with respect to existing topics. “The heads of schools and teachers may ensure that the topics that have been reduced are also explained to the students to the extent required to connect different topics,” the CBSE said in a statement. “However, the reduced syllabus will not be part of the topics for internal assessment and year-end Board examination.”
The deletions were made on the direction of the Ministry of Human Resource Development after it asked the CBSE to reduce the syllabus for Class nine to Class 12 for the academic year 2020-’21 by up to 30% to make up for the academic loss caused by the pandemic.
Schools and colleges in India were closed about a week before the imposition of the countrywide lockdown on March 25. While some educational institutions in India have switched to online classes amid a surge in coronavirus cases, all of them will remain closed till July 31.
CBSE said that the syllabus for schools has been revised because of the “extraordinary situation” prevailing in India and other parts of the world. “Considering the importance of achieving the level of learning, the syllabus has been rationalised to the extent possible by retaining core concepts,” the board said in a circular.
Minister of Human Resource Development Ramesh Pokhriyal said that the Centre had asked educationists for suggestions on how to reduce the burden on students. “I am glad to share that we received more than 1.5K suggestions,” he tweeted. “Thank you, everyone, for the overwhelming response.”
India is now the third worst coronavirus-hit country in the world. The country’s coronavirus tally rose to 7,19,665 on Tuesday, with 22,252 new cases in 24 hours. The toll went up by 467 to 20,160.
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