Union Human Resource Development Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank on Thursday responded to criticism about the Central Board of Secondary Education reducing the syllabus for students due to the COVID-19 pandemic, terming it “uninformed commentary” and an attempt to “portray a false narrative”.
“There has been a lot of uninformed commentary on the exclusion of some topics from CBSE syllabus. The problem with these comments is that they resort to sensationalism by connecting topics selectively to portray a false narrative,” he said in a series of tweets.
A one-time measure
He said the CBSE had clarified that the subjects excluded were a one-time measure for exams due to the pandemic and that they had already been covered in the alternate academic calendar. The aim of the exercise, which involved recommendations from experts, was to reduce the stress on students by cutting the syllabus by 30%.
“While it is easy to misconstrue exclusion of 3-4 topics like nationalism, local government, federalism, etc. and build a concocted narrative, a wider perusal of different subjects will show that this exclusion is happening across subjects.”
For example, he said, measures of dispersion and balance of payments deficit were removed from economics, heat transfer and convection and radiation were removed from the physics syllabus, properties of determinants were removed from mathematics and portions of mineral nutrition, digestion and absorption were removed from biology.
”It can be no one’s argument that these topics have also been excluded by malice of some grand design which only partisan minds can decipher...Let us leave politics out of education and make our politics more educated,” he said.
