Empowering SCERT in J&K

To streamline school education across the country, NCERT was established way back in 1961. Ever since progressive reforms and innovations in curriculum development, teaching and learning methodology in school education have been adopted by the council consistently. In order to ensure that this ever evolving process gets percolated down to the state level effectively for better results, need to have such bodies at the state level was felt, thus giving the idea of establishing State Council of Educational Research and Training for every state.

Accordingly, SCERTs were established across all the states in the country, J&K being the only exception. Orissa happens to be the first State in the country to establish the first SCERT way back in 1979. Likewise, Punjab established its SCERT in 1981 and other states followed the idea. Even the newly carved out states of Uttarakhand, Jharkhand and Chattisgarh, created in the year 2000 CE, also established their own SCERTs. Given the homogeneity of cultural, lingual and socio-economic fabric of Hindi speaking states like Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Haryana, Uttarakhand Chattisgarh, Jharkhand and Bihar, it could be safely argued that school curriculum requirements of these states could very well be met with that of the main one drafted by NCERT, still to the best advantage of students and teachers, all these states established their own SCERTs.

Perhaps the state that would have required SCERT the most happened to be our Jammu and Kashmir given its lingual and cultural diversity across all its geographical divisions including Ladakh, yet least attention was paid towards establishing the council, for reasons better known to power corridors. Sans the council, J&K State Board of School Education took over this job and continued to do so till 2020.

After a very long wait of about four decades, HRD Ministry approved creation of SCERT for J&K in 2017. The council was finally established in August 2020 even though the process for the same had started in 2004 itself.

Among other things, the main task of SCERT is preparing State level curriculum in accordance with the framework laid down by NCERT. It may be mentioned here that SCERTs in states like Assam, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Kerela, Telangana, Haryana, Chattisgarh and Orissa are already preparing and publishing text books for schools.

Ironically that is not happening in J&K for the time being. There is no doubt that J&K Board of School Education has been publishing text books and has done a great job by adopting NCF 2005 recommendations. Acting on these recommendations, local content regarding state geography, history and poll sciences has been added in the text books. Content compilation and paper quality has been a concern though.That however, is a different debate.

With NEP 2020 in place, a new National Curriculum Frame Work for School Education (NFC- SE 2023) has been rolled out by NCERT and hence NCERT is in the process of making altogether a new series of text books. Consequently, J&K has to follow suit. It is ripe time that the Curriculum Research and Development Wing-CRDW, existing within Division of Academics, J&K BOSE is disbanded and resources thereof channeled by BOSE internally. All important task of curriculum development and text book making needs to be assigned to SCERT at the earliest.

Division of Academics of the Board has its own well defined mandate of framing syllabi for board examinations and monitoring implementation of academic calendar across J&K. SCERT, meanwhile needs to exhibit an proactive approach towards the new assignment which is challenging but working in synergy with Academics Division of BOSE, this task can be achieved with promising and long lasting results. Fortunately the Srinagar offices of both the Board and the Council are situated next to each other in the same campus at Bemina.

Tail Piece:

To woo gullible students and parents, some coaching centres resort to tacit practice of misleading advertisements where in coaching is offered for both NCERT and CBSE syllabi. One fails to understand how can you compare NCERT with CBSE when both have different domains of work and that CBSE itself recommends teaching of NCERT books?

If at all you need a comparison, it can be between CBSE and respective State Boards. Even that too does not make much sense.