Gita lessons in morning assembly mandatory for over 600 Ahmedabad schools

The Ahmedabad District Education Office (Rural) has created audiovisual lessons to implement the Gujarat Education Department’s decision. These shall be taught in 650 secondary and higher secondary schools in the city.

“These videos will be a mandatory part of the morning assembly in more than 600 schools in Ahmedabad. One shloka or one video will be taken every week. A circular for the same will be issued to all schools in a day or two after the launch today. The move has been taken under the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 and the state government’s initiative,” DEO Ahmedabad Rural Krupa Jha told The Indian Express.

“The Education Department – for the statewide implementation of Bhagavad Gita – has incorporated two chapters in the form of stories as a part of Gujarati first language curriculum from Classes VI till XII for the state board schools while for a separate literature has been prepared for non state board schools,” said V R Gosai, Director, Gujarat State School Textbook Board (GSSTB).

Character-building, distraction management, stress management, and food management– these and many more aspects linked to modern lifestyle challenges will be covered in learnings from 51 shlokas (verses) of Bhagavad Gita, which will be imparted through video lessons and behavioural weekly assignments to students, said officials. On the project’s applicability, Krupa Jha said, “It will apply to all schools — government, grant-in-aid and private. Even as we cannot force it, the minority-run schools will be advised to implement the project in their schools too.”

Training of over 3,000 teachers is set to commence this week under the project.

DAV International School principal Nivedita Ganguli was approached for creating these videos. “We started conducting Bhagavad Gita lessons for schools after the pandemic. At a session on Gita Jayanti last year where officials of the DEO were also present, I was approached to work on this project. Having read and practiced Bhagavad Gita for over 10 years, I readily agreed as I am always open to contribute for the same,” she said.

One of the videos shows her delivering the first shloka of first adhyay (chapter) of Bhagavad Gita on life-management in Sanskrit and Hindi. Explaining the verse word-by-word and then relating it to modern-day problems in the three-minute video, she says, “If your parents scold you for anything wrong, then learn from it and never repeat that mistake.”

At the end of every lesson, there is an assignment for students. “Identify one point in your behaviour like watching more video games…. monitor that for a week. Any one thing you feel you want to improve, practice that for a week and rate yourself, monitor the improvement and add remarks too everyday on how you change that behaviour,” Ganguli is heard saying at the end of the video.

While recording these 51 videos, Ganguli said, she focused on the shlokas that are related to modern challenges. “Like sense of respect, caste or discrimination or any other form, differences that are ingrained in us, character-building, stress and distraction management, honesty, courage quotient, food management, meditation, equality, bullying which is a major problem today… these have been the focus,” she tells this paper.

The Ahmedabad DEO will conduct competitions among students to evaluate their grip on the lessons, officials said.