Sudha Murthy, Shankar Mahadevan on NCERT’s 19-member panel to develop new textbooks

NEW DELHI, Aug 12 (PTI): Infosys Foundation Chairman Sudha Murthy, music maestro Shankar
Mahadevan, economist Sanjeev Sanyal and 16 others are part of a new committee constituted by the
NCERT to revise textbooks according to the new curriculum, officials said.
The 19-member National Syllabus and Teaching Learning Material Committee (NSTC) will be headed by
National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration (NIEPA) chancellor MC Pant and develop
textbooks for classes 3 to 12.
The committee is mandated to prepare the textbooks, and other teaching learning materials, which will,
in turn, be published and used by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), as
per the terms of reference, a senior official said.
“The NSTC will be assisted by Curricular Area Groups (CAGs) in the development of the teaching-learning
material for each curricular area. These groups will include appropriate experts for the said subject, and
will be formed by the chairperson and the co-Chairperson of NSTC, with the assistance of NCERT,” the
official said.
The committee will work to align the curriculum with the National Curriculum Framework for School
Education (NCF-SE) developed by the K Kasturirangan-led steering committee as a part of the
implementation of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020.
While the final NCF-SE has already been submitted to the Union ministry of education, it is yet to be
released in the public domain. The draft of the framework was released in April.
The committee is co-chaired by Manjul Bhargav, a professor of mathematics at Princeton University. Its
other members include mathematician Sujatha Ramdorai, badminton player U Vimal Kumar,
chairperson of Centre for Policy Studies MD Srinivas, and chairperson of Bharatiya Bhasha Samiti Chamu
Krishna Shastry.
The dropping of several topics and portions from NCERT textbooks in May triggered a controversy, with
the opposition blaming the BJP-led Centre for “whitewashing with vengeance”.
At the heart of the controversy was the fact that while the changes made as part of a rationalisation
exercise were notified, some of the controversial deletions were not mentioned. This led to allegations
about a bid to delete these portions surreptitiously.
Although the NCERT acknowledged that the omissions in the textbooks may have been unintentional,
they declined to reverse the deletions.
The NCERT said the removals were made based on the recommendations provided by experts.