A Curriculum Without Calculation: The Risks of UGC’s Math Overhaul
Saumya Malviya | 28 November 2025 | The Indian Express
As reported in this newspaper on September 20, in an unprecedented move, mathematicians across the country came together to sign a petition against the draft of UGC’s learning outcome-based curriculum framework (LOCF) for mathematics. Unprecedented, because the usually inert community of mathematicians thought it necessary to raise its voice against what it sees as an ill-conceived proposal to “reform” mathematics teaching and pedagogy.
The draft curriculum has been put under the critical scanner by mathematicians such as Amber Habib and R Ramanujam, among others. Not only have they highlighted its antiquarian approach and disconnect from contemporary methods of teaching by including archaic textbooks and half-baked courses, but they have also underlined the potential repercussions of forcibly embedding contemporary mathematics within Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS). They rightly note that this results in a disservice to both mathematics and “Indian” traditions of knowledge by making the former a site for ideological trial and error and making the latter sound self-evident, in the sense of it being “Vedic” or “Sanskritik”, without a sense of the multiple histories that lie beneath terms like “Indian”, “tradition” and “knowledge”…