Thirty-three authors, who wrote different chapters of the NCERT textbooks in 2005-07, have shot off a letter to the council’s director asking their names to be removed, saying their collective effort is now in “jeopardy”.
This comes days after the chief advisors of the original books –Yogendra Yadav and Suhas Palshikar — had written to the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) for the same.
“We have been following with growing concern, and increasing alarm, the public discussion on NCERT’s unilateral attempts to modify and revise textbooks produced collaboratively by scholars from across the country. We, the undersigned, have participated in these efforts to produce the textbooks in political science. We are now given to believe that this creative collective effort is in jeopardy,” the letter to NCERT director DP Saklani stated.
The authors have requested the council to delete their names from the Textbook Development Committee (TDC) of the reprinted political science textbooks.
The letter dated June 14 further said NCERT is now making changes to the textbooks, which include deletions of sentences and removal of some sections (even chapters), which is unacceptable. 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.
Last week, Yadav and Palshikar had written to the NCERT, calling the changes being done in the reprinted books (last year and current year) “embarrassing” and “mutilating”, and asked for their names being dropped from the latest textbooks.
However, reacting to this, the NCERT posted a statement on its website where it said since the textbooks have the council’s copyright and has contributions of all the experts, “dropping out the names of the chief advisors was out of question”.
The 33 authors, who have signed the letter, are from various central and state universities as well as independent researchers across the country including — Muzaffar Assadi, dean Faculty of Arts and professor, Mysore University, Kanti Prasad Bajpai, National University, Singapore Sabyasachi Basu Ray Chaudhury, Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata, Rajeev Bhargava, Hon Fellow, CSDS, Delhi, Dwaipayan Bhattacharya, CPS, JNU, Navnita Chadha Behera, Delhi University, Alex M George, independent researcher, Kerala; Malini Ghose, Nirantar, Center for Gender and Education; and Manish Jain, School of Education Studies, Ambedkar University, among others.
This story will be updated with the versions of some of these authors once their response is received.
In the letter, the authors also said political scientists, who contributed to this effort, came with multiple perspectives and had varied ideological positions. “Yet we were able to work together to produce what is, by any measure, a truly remarkable set of school textbooks in political science. The pedagogic strategy that was adopted, over several months, collectively deliberated upon and agreed to,” the NCERT statement read.
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