The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has slashed the Class 9 English syllabus, reducing the number of textbooks from two to one, and the number of texts from 29 to 16.
The new Class 9 English textbook opens with a story taken from a 2004 book How I Taught My Grandmother to Read and Other Stories by Rajya Sabha MP and author Sudha Murty.
It also includes texts by celebrated Indian writers such as Subramania Bharati and Rabindranath Tagore, and lesser-known foreign poets such as Bryanna T Perkins, Irene Chua and Robert Langley. Of the 29 texts across the two previous textbooks, 28 have been replaced in the new book.
OnlyO Henry’s short story The Last Leaf makes an appearance in the new book.
In the opening story of the new textbook — seen by HT, released on Monday — titled Kaveri, the narrator Murty recalls living with her grandparents in a village in north Karnataka at the age of 12, where poor transport meant the morning newspaper arrived only in the afternoon.
The new textbook, available on online shopping platforms, was developed in alignment with the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 and the National Curriculum Framework for School Education (NCF-SE) 2023. Titled Kaveri, the book will be introduced for Class 9 from the 2026-27 academic year, replacing the earlier textbooks Beehive and Moments.
“The book has been made available at online shopping platforms like Amazon from where students can order the book. However, the PDF format of the new book is yet to be uploaded on NCERT website’s book section,” a person aware of the development told HT.
In the foreword of the textbook, NCERT director Dinesh Prasad Saklani said: “The content of the book has been selected to engage learners with concerns of society, environment, ethics, science and technology, aspirations, and human relationships…
