Last week the Congress-led government in Karnataka revised its text books by removing the chapters on Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, on Friday the Bharatiya Janata Party government in Uttar Pradesh added biographies of 50 great leaders, including that of Savarkar, in the academic curriculum of students from Classes 9 to 12.
“The students will now read about the country’s great men, revolutionaries, freedom fighters, social reformers, historians and great personalities who sacrificed their lives for the country’s independence,” a government spokesman said here.
Recently, a list of the names of these great personalities was sent to the government by subject experts of the UP Board of Secondary Education, and after the government’s approval, a decision was taken to include the biographies of 50 great personalities, including Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, in the curriculum of the UP Board.
The biographies of these personalities have been included in moral sports, physical education and yoga subjects. These biographies will be incorporated into the curriculum in schools starting in July.
These subjects are compulsory for all students and it is mandatory for all students to pass them. However, the marks for these subjects will not be included in the mark sheets of Classes 10 and 12.
More than one crore students in classes 9 to 12 studying in over 27,000 government, government-aided and unaided schools of the UP Board will read the biographies of these great men.
Class 9th students will read the life stories of Chandra Shekhar Azad, Birsa Munda, Begum Hazrat Mahal, Veer Kunwar Singh, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Gautam Buddha, Jyotiba Phule, Chhatrapati Shivaji, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, Vinoba Bhave, Srinivasa Ramanujan and Jagadish Chandra Bose.
Class 10 students will read the life stories of Mangal Pandey, Roshan Singh, Sukhdev, Lokmanya Tilak, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Mahatma Gandhi, Khudiram Bose and Swami Vivekananda.
Class 11 students will read about Ram Prasad Bismil, Bhagat Singh, Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya, Mahavir Jain, Bharat Ratna Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya, Arvind Ghosh, Raja Rammohan Roy, Sarojini Naidu, Nana Saheb, Maharishi Patanjali, surgeon-physician Sushruta and Dr Homi Jehangir Bhabha.
Class 12 students will read about Ramakrishna Paramhansa, Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi, Rajguru, Rabindranath Tagore, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Rani Laxmibai, Maharana Pratap, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Adi Shankaracharya, Guru Nanak Dev, Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, Ramanujacharya, Panini, Aryabhatta and CV Raman.