The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has decided to drop the full chapter on the Periodic Classification of Elements, a full chapter on Democracy and Diversity, a full chapter on Challenges to Democracy, and a full chapter on Political Parties from the newly released textbooks for Class 10 students as part of their ‘rationalization’ exercise, reports emerged on Thursday.

It is established that the above-mentioned chapters have been deleted as part of a ‘rationalization’ meant to ‘reduce content load on students’.

As per the NCERT website, “The National Education Policy 2020, also emphasizes reducing the content load and providing opportunities for experiential learning with a creative mindset. In this background, NCERT has undertaken the exercise to rationalize the textbooks across all classes. Learning Outcomes already developed by the NCERT across classes have been taken into consideration in this exercise.”

“Contents of the textbooks have been rationalised in view of the Overlapping with similar content included in other subject areas in the same class, Similar content included in the lower or higher class in the same subject, Difficulty level, Content, which is easily accessible to students without much interventions from teachers and can be learned through children through self-learning or peer-learning, Content, which is irrelevant in the present context,” it added.