A panel of India’s National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT), which is tasked to devise the curriculum of textbooks for school education, has recommended to the federal government to change India’s name to Bharat in all school textbooks.
The proposal was mooted by a high-level seven-member committee for social sciences set up by the NCERT several months ago, and it was finally recommended to the federal government on Wednesday.
“The committee has unanimously recommended that the name Bharat should be used in textbooks for students across classes,” said the committee’s chairman C.I. Issac.
He said Bharat was an age-old name for the country, a usage found in ancient texts as old as 7,000 years.