Naional Pride in Indian Schools
While reading an opinion piece in The Hindu today, I was reminded of Khetaram, a Gramin Dak Sewak , of the dhaanis lying “some 120 km beyond the last railhead at Barmer , 50 km beyond the last phone and 10 km beyond where the Barmer-Chotan road directionlessly (sic) crumbles into sand so soft that even bicycles can’t ply…” What does the article in The Hindu and Khetaram of the Thar desert have in common? NCERT, India’s official institution for manufacturing textbooks as well as the country’s culture, is the answer. The article questions the worth of what NCERT calls the Indian Knowledge System (IKS). Khetaram is a postman in Rajasthan’s deserts and his story is one of the lessons in NCERT’s grade 9 English textbook, Kaveri . The article questions the worth of IKS. Khetaram makes us wonder whether the textbook is teaching the children English at all. Even the highest institutions of learning in India such as the IITs are asked to do research in IKS on topics such as ‘conscio...
