NCERT Drops Chapters On Periodic Table, Democracy From Class 10 Textbooks

New Delhi: In a bid to reduce the burden on students, the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has dropped the full chapter on Periodic Classification of Elements, a full chapter on Democracy and Diversity, a full chapter on Challenges to Democracy, and a full page on Political Parties from the newly released textbooks of Class 10 students.

As per the NCERT, the decision has been taken to reduce the content load on students in view of the COVID-19 pandemic. Complete chapters on these above subjects now stand deleted as a part of a "rationalisation" meant to reduce the "burden on students".

Among the topics dropped from the science textbook is also the chapter on environmental sustainability and sources of energy. According to the NCERT website, "The National Education Policy 2020, also emphasises reducing the content load and providing opportunities for experiential learning with a creative mindset. In this background, NCERT has undertaken the exercise to rationalise 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," NCERT said.