Several scientists and educators are protesting against the exclusion of Evolution Theory from curriculum

History indeed repeats first as tragedy and then as farce, as Marx had said. In 2017, the fundamentalist state of Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan removed Darwin’s Theory of Evolution from the school curriculum because it was a “controversial subject”, “above the students’ level and not directly relevant.” It was a tragedy for the Turkish state founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who had combined Islamism and political pluralism to make Turkey a model democracy in the Islamic world. Saudi Arabia is the only other country to exclude evolutionary theory from the school curriculum. Both Christian and Muslim creationists reject the theory of evolution. “The forces of darkness and ignorance are never permanently defeated”, the celebrated scientist and science-writer Asimov noted. Even in the USA, powerful evangelist groups have succeeded in banning evolution in some states and local schools. In 1925, a high school biology teacher named John Thomas Scopes was fined a hundred dollars by a court in Tennessee for teaching that humans had evolved from lower forms of life, against a law passed by the Tennessee legislature forbidding teachers in publicly supported schools to teach evolution.

Even now, equal time has to be given for teaching evolution and creationism in many of the publicly funded schools in the USA. But it was unthinkable that such a thing could ever happen in India, known for its prowess in science and technology that has propelled the country, once called the “Sick Man of Asia”, to the fifth largest economy in the world. But history never ceases to spring surprises. It is indeed a farce that in the pretext of rationalising the curriculum and reducing the load on students, NCERT has now removed the Theory of Evolution from the Class IX-X curriculum. According to a document released by NCERT, Chapter: 9 'Heredity and Evolution' has been replaced with 'Heredity'. Among the list of other dropped chapters are Charles Robert Darwin, Origin of Life on Earth, Molecular Phylogeny, Evolution, Tracing Evolutionary Relationships and Human Evolution.

Over 1,800 scientists, science teachers and educators from TIFR, IISc, IISER, IITs, and many other institutions have signed an open letter - ‘An Appeal Against Exclusion of Evolution from Curriculum’ - protesting against the move. They demanded that the theory of Darwinian evolution in particular be restored in secondary education. The letter rightly stated, “In the current educational structure, only a small fraction of students chooses the science stream in grade XI or XII, and an even smaller fraction of those choose biology as one of the subjects of study. Thus, the exclusion of key concepts from the curriculum till grade 10 amounts to a vast majority of students missing a critical part of essential learning in this field.” The letter further stated that an understanding of the process of evolution, “a law-governed process that does not require divine intervention”, is also crucial in building a scientific temper and a rational worldview: “The way Darwin’s painstaking observations and his keen insights led him to the theory of natural selection educates students about the process of science and the importance of critical thinking. Depriving students, who do not go on to study biology after the 10th standard, of any exposure to this vitally important field is a travesty of education.”

NCERT has recently been on a rampage of textbook revision. It has already dropped quite a few chapters from the history textbooks, mainly those dealing with the Mughal rule of India, which has already run into controversies with academicians. But its latest misadventure in biology is fraught with grave danger because it has the potential of turning India, a modern democratic secular state, into a fundamentalist Turkey or a Saudi Arabia. History can indeed be a tragedy.

Textbooks do not simply provide a framework for teaching and learning; their impact goes far deeper in shaping the future of a country because textbooks determine how young minds are to be moulded for the benefit of society. It will be dangerous to allow young minds to be shaped according to the ideology of any ruling party. Evolution is often decried by the Hindutva fundamentalists who contend that we had descended from Rishis and Munis and certainly not from lowly apes. The ignorance runs so deep that even a minister, and that too of human resources, had said in 2018 that the theory of evolution was ‘scientifically wrong’ because “no one has ever seen a monkey turn into a man.”

The present government’s intention and attitude towards science are becoming intriguingly suspect. Very recently, it has come out with a notification for winding up Vigyan Prasar, an autonomous institution under the Department of Science & Technology (DST) whose brief includes the popularisation of science and promoting scientific temper in the country. It is a unique institution in India with no parallel, within the government or outside, an institution that has been working quietly since 1989 when it was set up, to popularise science and to disseminate scientific knowledge through print and electronic media, books, journals and newsletters and films, and also through workshops and events conducted all over the country, with the help of a skeletal staff of only 10 scientists and some 25 administrative staff, on a scanty budget only Rs 14 crore a year for all its activities including establishment costs.

During its short span of existence, what it has produced will be the envy of any organisation: it has published 400 books by renowned scientists and science writers, produced over 3000 radio science programmes in 19 languages and 12 dialects and made more than 5000 films on popular science. It publishes a monthly bilingual journal called Dream 2047 in English and Hindi, with outreach to almost every government school in the country, besides 10 other monthly newsletters in Assamese, Bengali, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Maithili, Urdu, Kashmiri and Punjabi. It runs “India Science”, an internet-based 24X7 OTT channel telecast by Door Darshan and Sansad TV that remains the only source of scientific information for most of our students and rural folks to learn about science in layman's language.

The decision to wind up such an exemplary and lean organisation, an apolitical and neutral space for promoting science and scientific temper that the country needs so badly has been shocking, to say the least, and might spell the end of science popularisation in the country, despite the government’s pretensions to the contrary. It is supposedly being done for evolving a “new communication structure” to replace Vigyan Prasar, no details of which have been spelt out, because probably there is none. It is inconceivable that the DST will have the capacity to carry out these tasks – in any case, science communication is not a bureaucratic job, it requires specialised skills to take science to the people. It also requires a commitment and a missionary zeal that bureaucrats are hardly likely to possess. After all, why close down an efficient organisation that has been serving its purpose so well unless there is some other motive? Is this the way to promote science in a country that is still steeped in deep-seated superstitions and irrational beliefs, practices and attitudes, even among the so-called educated? The prime minister has always been forthright and rational in his views on science. The rest of the officialdom must come clean on the government’s policies on science too.

(The author is a former Director General from the Office of Comptroller & Auditor General of India. Views expressed are personal)