While defending the exclusion of Nehru’s biography, Gulab Devi, the secondary education minister (independent charge), stated “Nehru ne desh ke liye apne prano ki aahuti nahi di thi” implies Nehru did not make the supreme sacrifice for the country. Hence, he was not included in the list of 50 biographies of great men.

Speaking about including Savarkar, the minister said, “Are we supposed to tell our kids about terrorists instead of making them aware of the life and times of great personalities of India?”

Apart from this, the syllabus would also include biographies of Mahavir Swami, Bharat Ratna Mahamana Madan Mohan Malviya, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Sarojini Naidu, Nana Saheb, among others.

The decision to include the life stories of great men and freedom fighters in the curriculum was part of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Lok Kalyan Sankalp Patra released for the 2022 Legislative Assembly elections.

The finalisation of the names of the great men took place after a prolonged process within the UP Board, as stated by an official who did not wish to be identified.

UP Board secretary Dibyakant Shukla has said, “This subject is compulsory for all students and it is necessary to pass it. But, the marks will not be included in the high school and intermediate exams marksheet,” as quoted by HT.

Here is a list of biographies of great men in India about whom students will learn in respective classes:

In the 9th class, students will study biographies of Chandrashekhar Azad, Birsa Munda, Begum Hazrat Mahal, Veer Kunwar Singh, Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar, Gautam Buddha, Jyotiba Phule, Chhatrapati Shivaji, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, Vinoba Bhave, Srinivasa Ramanujan and Jagadish Chandra Bose.

In the 10th standard, the students will learn about Mangal Pandey, Roshan Singh, Sukhdev, Lokmanya Tilak, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Mahatma Gandhi, Khudi Ram Bose and Swami Vivekananda.

The UP Board has included biographies of Ram Prasad Bismal, Bhagat Singh, Bhimrao Ambedkar, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Pt. Deen Dayal Upadhyay, Mahabir Jain, Mahamana Madan Mohan Malviya, Arvind Ghosh, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Sarojini Naidu, Nana Saheb, Maharishi Patanjali, surgeon Sushruta and Homi Jehangir Bhabha in Class 11.

The class 12 students would study biographies of Ramakrishna Paramhansa, Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi, Rajguru, Rabindranath Tagore, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Rani Lakshmi Bai, Maharana Pratap, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Adi Shankaracharya, Guru Nanak Dev, APJ Abdul Kalam, Ramanujacharya, Panini, Aryabhatta and CV Raman.

Updated: 24 Jun 2023, 01:29 PM IST