"A process was adopted, which was totally professional," he said.
Facing criticism for the "rationalisation" of school textbooks which dropped the chapters on 'Kings and Chronicles' and the 'The Mughal Courts' from the CBSE medieval History textbooks for Class 12, NCERT, the top advisory body for Centre and state on school education, today said it's a professional exercise meant to help students hit by the pandemic and has no ulterior political motive.
"As we explained last year as well, there has been a lot of learning loss due to the Covid pandemic and the students underwent a lot of trauma. To help stressed students, and as a responsibility to society and the nation, it was felt that the content load in textbooks should be reduced," Dinesh Prasad Saklani, Director of NCERT, told NDTV.
Stressing that experts felt some chapters were overlapping across subjects and classes, he said some parts were removed to minimise the content load on students, who he said faced a traumatic pandemic and were under a lot of stress.
Mr Saklani said there are no new books, and that the revisions made last year, which the advisory body justified at length last year, will continue this academic year as well.
"A process was adopted, which was totally professional," he said.
The NCERT Director strongly rejected the allegations that the changes were made to suit a particular ideology.
CPI (M) leader Sitaram Yechury was among those who criticised the move, calling it communal.
"Communal rewriting of history intensifies. NCERT revises Class XII history book removing chapters on Mughal empire. The lands of India have always been the churning crucible of civilisational advances through cultural confluences," he tweeted.
In a jibe at UR Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, Shiv Sena (UBT) MP Priyanka Chaturvedi quipped that UP will produce its own version of history and biology.
Dinesh Prasad Saklani called the allegation "totally fake and baseless".
"It's a totally fake and baseless argument that textbooks are being rewritten to suit one particular ideology. There's no logic to bringing this debate up now as the NCERT last year, for three months, gave a very detailed explanation of the process and the removed content. There's no bias. It's an assumption of certain people, I don't know why," he said.
Many of the controversial changes were announced in early 2022 when the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) rationalised its syllabi in April. Besides schools under CBSE, some state boards also use NCERT textbooks.
Listing the changes, the NCERT, in a note, had said, "The content of the textbooks has been rationalised for various reasons, including overlapping with similar content in other subject areas in the same class, similar content included in the lower or higher classes on the same subject.