UP Board releases curtailed curriculum; Parsai’s prose, Shakespeare’s play omitted

UP Board has issued the much-awaited amended curriculum for classes 9 to 12 in accordance with the UP government’s decision to curtail syllabus by 30% for 2020-21 academic session.

The details have been uploaded on https://upmsp.edu.in/ late Monday night for the benefit of the students enrolled in the over 28,000 affiliated schools across the state, said officials.

As per the amended syllabus, this year the class 12 students of arts stream will not study ‘Ninda Ras’ the well-known satirical piece penned by Harishankar Parsai in Hindi prose while they will also skip study of noted play of William Shakespeare ‘Merchant of Venice’.

Some works of well-known Hindi authors like Suryakant Tripathi Nirala, Sumitranandan Pant, Maithili Sharan Gupt and Ramdhari Singh Dinkar have also been omitted from their syllabus for this year. However the students will not entirely miss out studying works of these Hindi literary greats as some of their works have been retained in their syllabus, officials said.

“Efforts have been made to keep the cuts balanced. We are also open to constructive suggestions in the topics and chapters omitted for the year. Such suggestions would be duly considered by our panel of subject experts and necessary changes made if found to have weight,” said UP Board secretary Divyakant Shukla.

Principal of KP Intermediate College Yogendra Singh said that in class 10 Hindi prose, three out of the total seven chapters, including ‘Irsha Tu Na Gayi Mere Man Se’ by Ramdhari Singh Dinkar, ‘Kya Likhoo’ by Padumlal Punnalal Bakshi and ‘Pani Mein Chanda Aur Chand Par Aadmi’ by Jaiprakash Bharti have been kept out. Similarly, in Hindi poetry’s 13 chapters  some portions of the works by authors like Sumitranandan Pant, Mahadevi Verma and Makhanlal Chaturvedi have been omitted while entire chapters like ‘Bharat Mata Ka Mandir Hai Ye’ by Maithili Sharan Gupt, ‘Nadi’ by Kedarnath Singh and ‘Yuva Jungle’ by Ashok Vajpeyi  have been kept out of the course.

In class 10 English prose, ‘A Torchbearer’ by Edith Wharton and ‘Our Indian Music’ by R Srinivasan while in poetry works like ‘The Nation Builders’ by Ralph Waldo Emerson and from supplementary reader chapters like ‘My Greatest Olympic Prize’, a short story describing Jesse Owens’ experience at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin have been kept out. In Science, topics like ‘Metals and non-Metals’, ‘Periodic classification of elements’, ‘Effect of current’, ‘Magnetic effects of current’ and ‘Natural Resources’ have been omitted while in Mathematics ‘Trigonometric identities’, ‘Sequences and series’ etc as well as chapters like ‘The age of Industrialisation’, ‘ Political Parties’, ‘Currency and credit’ in social science have been kept out.

In class 12 history, chapters including ‘Colonialism’ and ‘Understanding partition’ while in civics lessons like ‘US Hegemony’, ‘Security in contemporary world’ and ‘Politics in Independent India’ etc have been kept out or this year. Similarly, chapter on ‘Globalisation and social changes’ in sociology has also been omitted.