Hilarious since all CBSE books have been easily available on the NCERT website since several years as PDFs.<p>The new government seems to be taking credit for making an app to download these PDFs.
Making books and other materials available online is a first step but am concerned about the quality of the content. Many times the books were not clear about the point they are trying to make, the experiment how its performed, etc. They often added some content, especially towards the end of the chapter, which was just a paragraph or so and did not explain what it is. Other thing is that students don't get to know about the practical applications. Consider calculus or binomial theorem, most of the students as well as teachers don't know about its applications. Unfortunately, if your teacher isn't that good, you would not understand and appreciate the subject. Given that internet is still not widely available, the students cannot search for additional material or get their questions answered.
While this is good news, CBSE is just one of the many (although the largest and possibly the best) school systems in India. This particular one is controlled by the central government and they are releasing books being used by this particular school system.
Am from India and was a passout of the CBSE curriculum school eons ago. And did not know that NCERT had these books in PDF since many years!<p>Thank you for the information.
As others point out, the NCERT textbooks have been available online for a while, if slightly more difficult to download. But why stop there?<p>I wish they would put the source online as well, with instructions on how to build it (preferably using Free/Open Source software). Now <i>that</i> would be a bold and groundbreaking move.
Ah you mean this which is already online yo
<a href="http://www.ncert.nic.in/ncerts/textbook/textbook.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.ncert.nic.in/ncerts/textbook/textbook.html</a>
What is the format, I wonder?<p>HTML can do animations, lots of graphics, etc., but sometimes struggles with math. PDF (from LaTeX) does a great job at math but making it do executable things is tough.
This is good. But I wish India would release all the content it generates as public domain, like the US. It was paid for by the people. It should belong to and be made available to the people.