Students of university and college may be required to study plastic surgery in accordance with Vedic astronomy and ancient Sanskrit text ‘Sushruta Samhita’. It will be the same for the students of medicine as they will also be required to study credit courses on “Indian Systems of Medicine”, which also includes Ayurveda and Siddha.
University Grants Commission (UGC)’s draft ‘Guidelines for Incorporating Indian Knowledge in Higher Education Curricula’ proposes these initiatives to help colleges and universities to improvise courses and programs based on Indian Knowledge System for students.
The students will have an understanding to how the knowledge of the past can be linked with the contemporary education which will help them find new perspectives to build sustainable human communities. It was introduced as a concept in the NEP 2020.
IKS can be defined as a body of systematized disciplines of knowledge developed to a high degree of sophistication from ancient times and of all traditions and practices that various communities of India, including the tribal communities of India have practiced, , evolved and preserved for generations.
Every student is required to take credit courses in IKS, which at least amounts to 5 percent of their total mandate courses. It is only a student is able to obtain a degree. The 50% of the total credits for IKS must be related to a major and is also to be accounted to that particular major discipline. That is, if a student who pursues BSc in science with Maths as his/her major, then he or she is required to take up a course related to IKS. In this case, it might be ‘numbers, fractions, and geometry in Vedas’.
For students who pursue modern medicine, a credit course has been proposed in the first year by the UGC and a two semester credit course on ‘theory and practice’ of Naturopathy, Ayurveda, Siddha, Homeopathy, Yoga, and Unani.
“ancient records of the observation of the motion of celestial bodies in the Vedic corpus”, “ astronomy as the science of determination of time” , “place and direction by observing the motion of the celestial bodies” are some of the suggested courses by UGC in the field of astronomy. The other courses suggested as per the guide lines include “Splendid geographical isolation of India and the uniqueness of Indian culture”, “Ramayana and Mahabharata, and their important regional versions”, “Puranas”, Foundational texts of Indian Philosophies”, including the “Jaina and Bauddha”, and “foundational texts of Indian religious sampradayas, from the Vedic period to the Bhakti traditions of different regions”.
UGC has made the draft public to receive feedback till April 30. It has also has also sent the guidelines to universities and colleges for their suggestions.
