The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has dropped up to 30 per cent syllabus for classes 9 to 12 for the academic year 2020-21 to reduce course load on students amid the COVID-19 crisis, Union HRD Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal 'Nishank' announced on Tuesday.
The curriculum has been rationalised while retaining the core elements, the Human Resource Development said.
"Looking at the extraordinary situation prevailing in the country and the world, CBSE was advised to revise the curriculum and reduce course load for the students of classes 9 to 12.
"To aid the decision, a few weeks back I also invited suggestions from all educationists on the reduction of syllabus for students and I am glad to share that we received more than 1.5K suggestions. Thank you, everyone, for the overwhelming response," Nishank tweeted.
"Considering the importance of learning achievement, it has been decided to rationalise syllabus up to 30 per cent by retaining the core concepts," he added.
According to the updated curriculum, among the chapters deleted from class 10 syllabus are-- democracy and diversity, gender, religion and caste, popular struggles and movement, challenges to democracy For class 11, the deleted portions included chapters on federalism, citizenship, nationalism, secularism, growth of local governments in India.
Similarly, class 12 students will not be required to study chapters on India's relations with its neighbours, changing nature of India's economic development, social movements in India and demonetisation, among others.
Twitter criticized CBSE's move of omitting important chapters. Here are a few Twitter reactions:
(With PTI inputs)