Even today, most IAS aspirants start their preparation with a familiar ritual: “First finish NCERT.” Whenever there is confusion about a concept from school-level history, geography, polity or science, the safest advice still is, “Go back to NCERT.” For a vast majority of learners, NCERT textbooks function as the most legitimate, certified source of school knowledge—clean, reliable, and supposedly free from ideological noise.
But this very trust raises a difficult question: are NCERT textbooks truly free from bias? When we read them as the ultimate authority, it becomes easy to forget that textbooks are not just collections of facts. They are carefully designed narratives. They decide whose histories matter, whose work counts as knowledge, whose lives are worth telling, and whose experiences can be safely left out. In other words, they are as much about selection and silence as they are about information.
This is where questions of equality enter. Do NCERT lessons see all their readers equally? A child reading these textbooks might be a girl from a rural Dalit family, an Adivasi boy, a Muslim student from a small town, a first-generation learner whose parents never went to school, or a middle-class student in an English-medium school. When these children open the same book, do they all find themselves represented with dignity, complexity and agency? Or do some of them only see themselves in the background—as labourers, victims, beneficiaries of “uplift”—while others appear as scientists, leaders, thinkers and heroes?
Research on Indian textbooks has repeatedly shown how gender and social biases operate in subtle but powerful ways. Studies of NCERT and state board books point out that male characters dominate stories and examples; women and girls are often shown inside homes or in caring roles, while men occupy public spaces and prestigious professions. Similar patterns appear with caste, class and religion: some communities are named as agents of change, while others appear mainly as problems to be solved or groups to be helped. These patterns are not always loud or crude, but they quietly teach students who is “naturally” meant to lead and who is expected to adjust.
For IAS aspirants, this has a double impact. On the one hand, NCERT textbooks are genuinely useful: they provide clear explanations, establish fundamental concepts, and form the backbone of preparation for the UPSC Preliminary Examination. On the other hand, if aspirants only memorise what is printed without questioning it, they risk internalising the same narrow lenses. Tomorrow’s administrators may then carry into their decision-making the blind spots they learnt as unquestioned truths in school.
The video conversation with Dr. Birendra Singh Rawat grows out of precisely this tension. It invites us to sit with the discomfort of asking hard questions about a beloved institution. The aim is not to discard NCERT or to dismiss its value, but to shift the stance from blind trust to critical trust. Instead of treating these books as sacred and beyond critique, the invitation is to read them with open eyes: to notice who is present, who is missing, and what that might mean for the millions of students who rely on them.
In that spirit, this blog post is a doorway rather than a conclusion. It asks you—as a student, teacher, parent, or aspirant—to join the dialogue. The next time you open an NCERT textbook, do not just ask, “Is this important for the exam?” Also ask, “Important for whom? Told by whom? And who is still waiting to be seen on these pages?”