UGC’s draft mathematics curriculum will ‘cripple generations of students’; experts demand withdrawal

Flagging “grave” defects, several teachers, researchers, educators, and students have urged the University Grants Commission (UGC) to withdraw the draft curriculum for mathematics and reconstitute a committee of experts to redesign it. The mathematicians raised issues of inadequate coverage of important topics, lack of relevant courses, advanced elective courses, poorly conceived value-added courses, among others.

More than 900 of academicians including Padma and Bhatnagar Prize awardees along with students have signed a petition, arguing that the proposed curriculum does not do justice to the “rich tradition” of mathematics in our country and will "cripple" generations of students to come.

This will not only affect the practice of mathematics, the experts argued, but also mathematics‐dependent fields such as sciences, economics and engineering. “To avoid this undesirable outcome, we suggest a simple measure that you alone can take: withdrawal of the current draft and reconstitution of a committee of experts in mathematics and its pedagogy to redesign the curriculum,” the signatories said.

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Issues in UGC LOCF curriculum for mathematics

While each individual has criticised the UGC draft mathematics curriculum 2025 in their own capacities in the petition, here’re the major problems with the current draft as per the experts:

• Important topics such as real analysis, linear algebra, and algebra, are inadequately covered. Algebra is forced into one semester and real analysis is introduced later in the curriculum leaving no room for natural subsequent courses.
• Instead of useful and relevant courses, ‘obsolete’ courses like analytical geometry and mechanics have been added.
• Applied mathematics is short-changed, programming and numerical methods are outside the core. Statistics is stuffed into one course. The opportunity for practical and application-based components in statistics, machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), etc. has been wasted.
• 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).
• Some of the courses on mathematics in other disciplines (physics, chemistry, life-sciences) are at loss as most mathematics teachers do not have the knowledge to teach courses such as quantum mechanics, and students do not have the background needed to understand such courses. Mathematics in arts subjects (music, drama, arts) have similar problems, only more serious as they are farther from the expertise of most mathematics teachers. Moreover, mathematics in meditation does not belong in an undergraduate curriculum.
• The value-added-courses, fourteen of them, which are supposed to prepare the students for the modern workforce (according to the NEP) do no such thing. Most of these courses have no content beyond high-school mathematics.
• In multiple courses, the given references do not exist. For example, the books of Rudin (Mathematics in Physics), Karlin and Taylor (Mathematical Psychology), Glenn Ledder (Mathematics in Sustainability), Mirabai Starr (Mathematics in Meditation), Myers and Henson (Mathematical Psychology). It raises serious questions on how this draft curriculum was prepared.

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The draft curriculum does not prepare a student to pursue an MSc, let alone a PhD or a job in industry, the petitioners remarked.

“In this country, we have many excellent mathematicians and outstanding teachers of mathematics. Having benefited from the best education this country provides and being aware of the best practices in the world, they would be more than willing to lend their services. Tapping into this readily available human resource will allow the UGC to design a modern and balanced curriculum that also addresses the specific requirements of the country,” the students and teachers further said.