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The NCERT Manual Saga: Release and Withdrawal
3-min read | November 8, 2021
This week, recognising the urgency to address gender disparities in education, the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) in Delhi released a new publication titled, Inclusion of Transgender Children in School Education: Concerns and Roadmap — training material/manual to sensitise teachers, administrators about transgender and gender-nonconforming children. The training material elucidates concepts such as gender identity, gender incongruence, gender dysphoria, gender affirmation among various others. It also provides definitions of terms that people use to identify themselves; some of these are gender fluid, agender, transfeminine, and transmasculine.
Following the release of this document, there was a widespread backlash on social media. Vinay Joshi, a former RSS pracharak, and an “activist” against fraudulent religious conversions made the complaint to NCPCR. The complainant organization, Legal Rights Observatory, alleged that the manual has been “drafted by intellectually bankrupt leftist elements capable of traumatizing students”.
OpIndia, a right-wing website posted an article on the manual accusing the council of turning “woke”, and objected to the introductory section of the manual which talked about caste patriarchy and the stigmatisation of transgender people. The manual itself is now no longer available on the NCERT’s website.
“... when nature has given you certain genders, trying to convince students that they might not be the same gender to which they are born is just tampering and interfering with the natural process,” says Vinay Joshi to The Hindu.
A 2019 study by UNESCO and Sahodaran, revealed that nearly 70% of the bullied LGBTQIA+ students in India suffer from anxiety and depression. The study reveals that 73% had reduced their social interactions with peers, 70% had lost their concentration in studies, 63% reported lower academic performance, 53% reported having skipped class, while about 33.2% said physical bullying has played a key role in discontinuing school.
Thus, this manual, a vital initiative by NCERT, could have been effective in dismantling and addressing issues faced by queer, neurodivergent and disabled students. The Indian education and societal system emphasize the role of teachers in the conception of a child’s identity and their role in laying the base for their success, this manual would’ve played a crucial part in educating teachers and reforming the educational system to be more inclusive of queer, neurodivergent and disabled identities from the bottom up.
However, the withdrawal of the manual speaks volumes rather than its previous release and plan of implementation. The release of this manual and the subsequent poignant backlash highlights that we have a long distance to cover before queer, neurodivergent and disabled students’ issues can be addressed and acknowledged efficiently enough to construct and provide government machinery, medical infrastructure and social support to protect their interests in the classroom and outside, in professional and social spheres.
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