New Delhi: Amid a row over the alleged removal of the Constitution’s Preamble from the revised Class 9 Social Science textbook, NCERT has clarified to ANI that reports claiming the Preamble has been dropped are “misleading”, saying the curriculum has been reorganised under the National Curriculum Framework (NCF) with topics distributed across different grades instead of being confined to a single textbook.
According to ANI, National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) sources clarified that the Preamble continues to appear in the opening pages of all newly published NCERT textbooks, including all Social Science textbooks. They added that the Preamble also remains part of the Class 10 syllabus.
The clarification comes after reports suggested that the revised Class 9 Social Science textbook had omitted the Preamble and references to terms such as “secular” and “secularism”, while introducing new sections on the 1975-77 Emergency and the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. The changes had triggered political criticism from the Opposition.
‘CONSTITUTIONAL VALUES NOT REMOVED’
NCERT sources maintained that constitutional values have not been removed from the curriculum but redistributed across classes as part of the pedagogical redesign envisaged under the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 and the National Curriculum Framework.
According to the sources, concepts such as secularism, justice, liberty and socialism are already introduced to students in Classes 6 to 8, particularly in the Class 7 Social Science textbook. These themes, they said, will be revisited in greater depth in Class 10, where students study the Constitution more comprehensively.
The revised Class 9 Social Science textbook is part of NCERT’s ongoing curriculum overhaul under the NCF. Besides integrating history, geography, political science and economics into a single volume, it also introduces, for the first time, a detailed section on the Emergency, describing it as a major challenge to Indian democracy.
NCERT’s clarification seeks to counter claims that constitutional principles have been deleted from school education, asserting instead that the new curriculum follows a progression-based approach in which key concepts are introduced and reinforced across multiple grades rather than repeated in one textbook alone.
