ABC Chemistry · Statement
A chemistry teacher's full statement
A note before I begin. I teach chemistry, and I run a coaching institute. That means I have an interest in this subject, and you should read what follows knowing that. It also means I see, every single week, exactly what a student arrives at my door not knowing. This is written from that side of the desk.
Nothing here is an attack on any institution or any individual. Every point below is something I would say to the people responsible, in a room, to their face.
Take any Class 11 or Class 12 textbook currently in use and check it against four basic questions:
That last one deserves its own sentence, because it is the most damaging and the easiest to fix.
A mathematics book without answers cannot be used for self-study.
A student working alone at home has no way of knowing whether they are right. They cannot correct themselves. They cannot build confidence. They are forced to find a teacher or a coaching centre simply to be told whether their answer is correct.That is not a shortcoming. That is a design decision, and it manufactures dependence.
We regulate medicine. We regulate food. We regulate construction materials. We do not meaningfully regulate the quality of the books we hand to children for twelve years.
There should be a published minimum standard, enforced at least up to Class 12, that no textbook may fall below. Concretely:
A standard of this kind does not mandate any particular publisher. It only says: below this line is not acceptable for a child's education.
The ICSE pattern is, in my assessment, considerably better constructed than the current CBSE pattern. Its question papers demand more reasoning, its coverage is deeper, and its books carry more of the explanatory weight themselves.
CBSE's pattern and syllabus should be brought up to an equivalent level. This is not a matter of national pride between boards — it is that two children in the same city, sitting the same entrance exams two years later, are currently being prepared to two different standards.
During Covid-19, chapters were removed. At the time that was a reasonable emergency measure. The pandemic ended years ago. The chapters have not come back.
Class 11 · Chemistry units
Class 12 · Chemistry chapters
That is roughly a third of the chapters gone outright. And the chapter count understates it, because topics were also deleted inside the chapters that survived — so the actual loss of content is substantially larger than these numbers suggest. Anyone who has taught from both the old and the current books can feel the difference; it is closer to half the book than to a third.
Count what was removed and the pattern is unmistakable. Hydrogen — gone. The s-block — gone. The Class 11 p-block — gone. The Class 12 p-block — gone. Metallurgy — gone.
Out of syllabus Still included
What survives of inorganic chemistry? Periodicity, chemical bonding, the d- and f-block, and coordination compounds.
An entire branch of chemistry has been removed from school education. Not trimmed. Removed.
And here is the part that makes it indefensible: these topics are still on the JEE and NEET syllabi. The competitive exams did not shrink. Only the schooling did.
So a student who relies on school and NCERT alone will walk into an entrance exam and meet questions on material nobody ever taught them. That gap is filled by coaching. Which means the child whose family can pay clears it, and the child whose family cannot, does not. We have quietly converted a curriculum decision into a filter on income.
NCERT is often described as the bible of Indian schooling. It is not. In practice it functions as a topic list — a pocket reference from which a teacher picks up a heading and then teaches the actual content from elsewhere.
A child who prepares from NCERT alone will not clear a competitive entrance exam.
Every teacher knows this. Every coaching institute is built on it. Only the official position pretends otherwise.There are two honest paths here. Either enrich NCERT until it genuinely is sufficient on its own — which would be the better outcome for every child in the country. Or say openly that it is foundation material and that additional reference books, question banks and teaching are required. What is not acceptable is telling parents it is enough while the entire system operates on the knowledge that it is not.
Every question paper travels through nine stages. Many hands. The chain is only as strong as its weakest link — and we have spent years strengthening the strong links while leaving the weak ones exactly as they are.
After every leak there is an inquiry, a few arrests, some headlines, and then the identical failure at the next exam. We keep catching the incident. We never fix the structure that produced it.
The structural cause is that these functions have been handed to private and contract operators.
Look at the pattern across the leak cases of recent years. The point of failure is almost never the officer at the top. It is somewhere in the outsourced middle — a printing press, a transport contractor, a storage facility, a security detail. A handful of officials sit above that chain, and the actual custody of the paper sits below it, in hands that the system has given no reason to be careful.
I want to be very clear that this is not an accusation against those workers. It is a description of the position we have placed them in.
A contract worker in this chain is paid very little. There is no pension. There is no job security. There is no long-term stake in the institution. In many cases there is genuine hardship at home — households where the money for the month's food is not certain.
Now put a sealed question paper in that person's custody and ask them to refuse a large sum of money.
Where there is no accountability, honesty is left to chance.
We are relying on the personal virtue of the poorest and least protected person in the chain, having removed every institutional reason for them to be careful. A person under real financial pressure, who has nothing to lose because we gave them nothing to lose, will sometimes be moved by a small amount of money. That is not a moral failing unique to them. That is what any system designed this way will produce.My position, stated directly: the sensitive stages of the examination chain should not be outsourced at all.
Paper setting, moderation, printing, packaging, transportation, storage, security, evaluation, result processing — the people handling these should be permanent staff with something real at stake: a career, a pension, a service record, and the genuine prospect of losing all of it. Fear of consequence is not a pleasant mechanism, but it is the only one that has ever worked at scale, and it is the one we have systematically dismantled.
Alongside that:
There is one more thing I want on the record, because it is the reason more people in this field stay silent.
When somebody stands up for the workers at the bottom of this chain, or points at where the money and the failure actually sit, they generally do not receive a hearing. They receive opposition — and it comes from every direction at once.
It comes from those whose income depends on the present arrangement continuing. It comes from those who would rather attach the issue to a political agenda than solve it. And it comes, often, from people who agree privately and will not say so publicly.
The person raising the problem becomes the problem.
The effort shifts from fixing the fault to removing the person who named it, and to establishing that they were wrong, or motivated, or unqualified to speak.I am aware of this. I am writing it anyway, and I am putting my name on it.
A child who cannot afford coaching deserves just as good a book. A child who studies honestly for a whole year deserves the confidence that their paper will not leak. And the person who says these two things out loud should not have to expect to be treated as the enemy for it.
None of that is unreasonable to ask.
