Petition to withdraw the UGC draft curriculum 2025 for Mathematics B.Sc./B.A
07 September 2025
We, the undersigned researchers, teachers, and graduate students in mathematics and related disciplines, are deeply concerned by the UGC draft curriculum for Mathematics, 2025. It is riddled with grave defects, and if adopted, will damage the prospects of generations of students. By extension, every endeavor in the country that depends on mathematics (including the sciences, engineering, technology, and economics) will suffer. We urge the UGC to withdraw this draft and form a new committee consisting of expert mathematicians and teachers of undergraduate mathematics to redraft the curriculum.
What are the issues with the current draft? We make the case as succinctly as possible. More detailed critiques have been given by many of the signatories in their individual capacities, in the google feedback form provided by the UGC.
Topics that should form the bedrock of UG curriculum, such as real analysis, linear algebra, and algebra, are inadequately covered. Algebra is crammed into one semester and real analysis is introduced so late that it does not leave room for natural subsequent courses to be offered. Obsolete courses like Analytical Geometry and Mechanics (a legacy of the British system of education) take up the space that can otherwise be used to teach more useful and relevant courses.
Applied mathematics is short-changed; programming and numerical methods are outside the core. Statistics is stuffed into one course. In courses on statistics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, etc., it is natural and customary to have a practical and application-based component; this opportunity has been squandered.
Many elective courses require understanding of topics that have not been taught in basic courses. Mathematics in Music claims to require only class-10 mathematics, but the content includes Fourier analysis and Markov chains (which cannot even be taught at that stage). Fundamental concepts of sets, functions vector spaces are being taught in Mathematics for Machine Learning, which does not do justice either to these concepts, or to machine learning (which has only 15 hours left)…
Click here to read the complete statement and view the signatories.