The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) textbooks for Classes 6 and 3 have been newly developed in line with the National Curriculum Framework for School Education (NCF-SE 2023) and the New Education Policy (NEP) 2020.

The academic session started in April, and students returned to classrooms this month after summer vacations.

At present, physical or digital copies of textbooks for Mathematics, Science and Social Science are not available for Class 6. Digital copies are only available for three subjects: Hindi, English and Urdu. For Class 3 too, there are no physical copies of the Environmental Studies textbook.

On Thursday, Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan carried out a detailed review of the progress of NCERT textbook development. In a post on X, the Ministry of Education wrote:  “For the academic year 2024-25, new and engaging textbooks will be introduced in Classes 3 and 6. Textbook development work is in the final phase and 9 textbooks for Grades 3 and 6 are already available. The remaining 8 will be available very soon.”

Asked about the delay, sources from the NCERT said the new books will be introduced soon and that teachers and students would be able to grasp the new material because of the Bridge Programme held earlier.

In March, the Central Board of Secondary Education announced a ‘Bridge Month Programme’ (BMP) for Class 6. It included a week-wise timetable and an activity plan for each subject.

In the BMP’s guidelines, NCERT Director Dinesh Prasad Saklani wrote, “The transition of students to new syllabi and textbooks requires teachers to introduce all Grade 6 students to new pedagogical approaches… before they begin formal study of the new textbooks.”

ITL Public School Principal Sudha Acharya said, “We are following the old NCERT books… For Class 6, NCERT provided a bridge course in April-May and we followed that before the summer vacation. It was very good with loads of activities for students. But now it is late… the half-yearly examination will start in September… Teachers are waiting for the books anxiously. Until then, all we have is the old syllabus so we are teaching from that.”

She also said amidst this uncertainty, parents have been told not to buy old NCERT books to avoid wastage if new books are released.

At a tuition centre in Jwala Nagar, 11-year-old Mukul, who studies at Dayanand Model School in Vivek Vihar, was solving Math sums from a question bank; an old edition of the NCERT Mathematics textbook for Class 6 lay next to him. Priyanka Budhiraja (24), who teaches at the centre, said, “I asked a student to take printouts of soft copies of the latest NCERT textbooks available online, but parents said it was not economical for them to take printouts of every chapter.”

At The Indian School, principal Tania Joshi said they are following the syllabus with the soft copies available. “For classes 3 and 6, we can’t keep waiting till the books are printed. We are still seeing what can be done for the students,” she said, adding that changes in the textbooks have been “child-friendly”.

L V Sehgal, principal of the Bal Bharati Public School, Ganga Ram Hospital Marg, also said old NCERT books are being used.