NCERT’s responsibility is to make the people competent, improve knowledge levels: Dharmendra Pradhan

“NCERT’s responsibility is to make the people of the country competent and improve knowledge levels… you are nation builders,” Pradhan said.

Referring to the National Curriculum Framework (NCF) that was developed in 2000 – when an NDA government was in power – and then another NCF of 2005, prepared after the UPA government came to power, Pradhan said: “There was confusion in the minds of some people, so they tried to change it in 2005… NCERT is now bringing it into the correct perspective… some people who don’t understand the country…who are tied to slave mentality, they may have had some compulsion. It is a democracy, when they had power… they tried keeping the country deprived of atma nirbharta (self-reliance), they tried to make it a swabhiman-rahit samaj (society without self-respect). What can I tell them…”.

Pradhan praised the NCERT’s new modules, including those on Operation Sindoor and ‘Partition Horrors Remembrance Day’.

Speaking at the event, former ISRO Chairman S Somanath said: “I became somebody only because of the books that NCERT produced…We are the products of what we learn in our childhood, our careers, aspirations were shaped by what we learnt in those books. That is the importance of curriculum building, textbook writing, and educational content-creation.”

“The book that I learnt from – though it created me, where I’m standing today – it could have still been better. What were the weaknesses that existed in those books at that time? I need to relearn many things. I never realised what was the heritage of this country at that point. The scientific accomplishment of our nation was not mentioned in greater detail that I could appreciate…To feel proud of what we did, to understand how the process of learning happened in our country, how different science and technology existed here at some point in time. Those were missing. Today, change is happening, transformation is visible.”

Pointing out that “learning must get rooted in our own language”, he said: “One of the biggest problems that we saw when I went through my learning in school and higher education…I relied on books and content sourced from so many other nations. There were great textbooks in higher education. But many of them were not written in our languages. This is again an important effort that we are trying to make.”