When Missing Textbooks Become A Curriculum Crisis
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Half the academic year is behind us, and in a large number of CBSE schools, Class 9 students are still without their complete set of NCERT textbooks. The gap is not imaginary or anecdotal. NCERT itself confirmed in May this year that while four of the five new Class 9 books for the 2026-27 session, Mathematics, Science, English and Sanskrit, had been printed and uploaded to DIKSHA, the Social Science textbook, now rebranded as “Gateway to Social Science” under the new curriculum framework, was still in its final stages of development. Months later, many schools are yet to see it arrive.
What has filled that gap tells its own story. Private publishers moved quickly. Goyal Brothers Prakashan, among others, had a CBSE-aligned edition ready as early as February, well before the official NCERT book was anywhere close to print. Schools, unwilling to leave a term’s worth of teaching to chance, did what any functioning institution would do: they turned to these alternatives and asked parents to buy them.
This is where the real confusion begins, not in the classroom, but in how schools are now describing what they are doing. Some teachers themselves seem unsure whether they’re meant to follow the CBSE curriculum or the private books they’ve been handed, especially with half-yearly exams coming up and syllabus completion already under pressure. It’s a strange thing to hear from a school that’s supposed to be CBSE-affiliated, and it’s worth sitting with instead of brushing aside. A private publisher’s book built on the CBSE syllabus is still CBSE material at its core, nothing about the syllabus itself has changed, only where the printed book is coming from. So when a teacher says the school “isn’t following CBSE,” what do they actually mean by that? Is it the textbook they’re talking about, or the curriculum? Because those are two very different things, and mixing them up creates a confusion that doesn’t stay at the staffroom level, it lands squarely on a fourteen-year-old who’s just trying to figure out what she’s supposed to be studying for her exam.
CBSE, for its part, has not been entirely silent. Its own chairperson said publicly that teaching should not stop during this transition, effectively signalling that schools are expected to continue with whatever material bridges the gap, official or otherwise. That is a reasonable position to take in a crunch.
This is not a new problem for NCERT and CBSE. A similar textbook delay played out with the Class 6 curriculum overhaul in 2024, and the board found itself issuing clarifications after confusion spread about which classes were affected and by how much. The pattern repeating itself with Class 9, two years later, suggests this isn’t a one-off scheduling hiccup but a structural weakness in how curriculum transitions are managed and communicated.
This has created a burden on parents. They bought private books, and now, after CBSE books are available in the market, they have to buy those Part 1 sets as well. However, they are still waiting for Part 2 books of a few subjects, as they have yet to arrive in the market.
This is not even the end of it. NCERT has already confirmed that Class 10 is next in line for the same overhaul, with new textbooks scheduled to arrive for the 2027-28 academic session. Given how the Class 9 rollout has gone, four books ready, the fifth still missing months into the term, it is fair to ask whether NCERT and CBSE will actually have a complete, printed set ready in time for Class 10, or whether the country’s most consequential board-exam year is about to walk into the same scramble. A textbook delay in Class 9 is disruptive. The same delay in Class 10, right before students sit their boards, would be something closer to reckless. If there is a lesson from this year, it is that announcing a curriculum change and being ready to deliver it are two very different things, and CBSE owes it to a much bigger, higher-stakes batch of students to close that gap well before April 2027, not after.
Views expressed are personal
