Reducing syllabus load

Four days after Union HRD Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal had announced that the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has decided to reduce 30 per cent syllabus for students studying in Classes IX to XII, SEBA Chairman Ramesh Chand Jain has said that there was no such plan to reduce the syllabus load for students studying in schools affiliated to the Board of Secondary Education, Assam. Jain's statement made to this effect had appeared on the front page of this newspaper on Sunday, generating a lot of interest among the student community as well as their parents. Jain, a former bureaucrat who had handled the education department for a considerable period of time, also said that SEBA is confident of completing the syllabus despite the fact that Assam has so far lost around 90 academic days due to lockdown that began in March. Meanwhile, it is important to note what Union HRD Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal had said last Tuesday. He had said that the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has rationalized the syllabus by up to 30 per cent for Classes IX to XII for the academic year 2020-21 in order to reduce the course load of students amid the Covid-19 crisis. The CBSE decision incidentally was taken on the basis of suggestions received from a large number of persons related to the field of education, with the Union HRD Minister saying the majority stood for reduction of the syllabus load for the current academic year. The prime consideration behind the move was the importance of learning achievement, he has said. The CBSE had also asked NCERT to suggest topics and themes which are "either repeated or overlapped or learning outcomes related to it are being covered under other chapters" when it was looking to reduce the syllabus. Educational institutions across the country have remained shut since the middle of March as one of the measures to contain the Covid-19 outbreak. Meanwhile, a report prepared by UNICEF has said that the Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdown have together impacted about 247 million children enrolled in elementary and secondary education across India. Additionally, it has also affected a little over 28 million children who were undergoing pre-school education in Anganwadi centres, it said. There are also more than six million girls and boys across the country who were already out of school before the Covid-19 crisis had started. The UNICEF report has also indicated that approximately only a quarter of households (24 per cent) in India have access to the internet and there is a large rural-urban and gender divide.