A committee of experts, including several noted educationists, economists etc., has been constituted by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) to revise textbooks according to the new curriculum, officials said.
The members of the National Syllabus and Teaching Learning Material Committee are Infosys Foundation Chairman Sudha Murty, Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council Chairman Bibek Debroy, Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council member Sanjeev Sanyal, and noted singer-composer Shankar Mahadevan, among others.
Mahesh Chandra Pant has been named the Chairman of the 19-member committee. Pant is the Chancellor of the National Institute of Education and Planning in Administration.
The co-chairmanship of the committee has been assigned to Manjul Bhargava of Princeton University. Chamu Krishna Shastry, the Chairman of the Indian Languages Committee, a high-powered body for the promotion of Indian languages, has also been included in the committee.
The National Syllabus and Teaching Learning Material Committee will be an autonomous body whose task will be to prepare the syllabus for the students of classes 3 to 12.
Sudha Murty is the wife of Infosys Chairman Narayana Murthy and mother-in-law of UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
The committee members also include M.D. Srinivas, Chairman of Centre for Policy Studies, mathematician Sujatha Ramdorai and former badminton player-turned-coach U. Vimal Kumar.
The committee has been formed to develop NCERT textbooks. Recently, the National Curriculum Framework has been finalised by the 21-member steering panel which was headed by former ISRO Chairman K. Kasturirangan.
According to the Union Education Ministry, the textbooks and other teaching materials developed by the committee will be published by NCERT. Officials of the Ministry of Education said that the school textbooks of NCERT currently in vogue have been prepared on the basis of the National Curriculum Framework of 2005.
NCERT has already announced that it is going to introduce new textbooks for all classes.
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Seems a little strange: Not sure what a person like Manjul Bhargav who is not Indian (he was born in USA and lived there all his life) will do for textbook revisions in India. Seems like a token exercise. There are so many Indian scholars who have studied India and its culture from our viewpoint: they should have been in charge of these exercises.