The Indian National Science Academy is the IMU adhering organization for India. The country representative for ICMI is nominated by the Academy through a process of consultation by its advisory and section committees.
While there are 21 mathematical societies in India, some having a national, regional or more local reach, there is no association for mathematics education as such. Most of the societies are venues for mathematicians and university teachers of mathematics to meet periodically. Some of them publish periodicals which aid in this purpose. Some of them also take up mathematics popularization. The Indian Mathematical Society, the oldest one founded in 1907, is still active and publishes two quarterlies: The Journal of the Indian Mathematics Society, and the Mathematics Student. The Ramanujan Mathematical Society has perhaps the largest reach among the mathematics community.
Among those that explicitly aim to engage with mathematics education at school level, prominent are the Association of Mathematics Teachers of India and the Mathematics Teachers Association (India). While the former is a 60-year old society principally consists of school teachers seeking change in school mathematics, the latter is recent, formed in 2018 to provide a platform that brings together mathematicians, education researchers, policy makers and teachers.
India is a vast land, with a population of nearly 1.45 billion people, characterized by linguistic, religious, ethnic and cultural diversity. There are 71 Boards of Education in the country catering to this diversity. Apart from 5 central national level Boards, many are State Boards, but further separated by special needs: for instance, the state of West Bengal has 4 Boards of school education, one up to the secondary level, one separately for the higher secondary stage, one for madrasah schools, and one for open schooling. Education is on the concurrent list in the Indian constitution, whereby it is jointly administered by the Union Government and the State Government. Every Board is empowered to formulate its own curriculum, pedagogy and assessment, but broadly in line with the National Education Policy and the National Curriculum Framework laid down by the Union Government.
Such diversity makes it hard (perhaps impossible) for any single association to address the challenges of mathematics education in India. However, there is a strong tradition of critique on school education, including mathematics, at the national level as well as regional levels, published in many Indian languages. The book, Mathematics education in India: status and outlook published on the occasion of the Indian National Presentation at ICME-12 in Seoul, presented a viewpoint, offering an insight into not only the problems and potential of mathematics education in India but also how they are approached by scholars active in this arena.
Rather unfortunately, there are no journals in India dedicated to research on school education, either in mathematics or other disciplines. While education departments of all universities carry out research, they principally constitute quantitative parametric research, with little or no impact on the education system. Only a few centers of education research in the country carry out research that gets published in international avenues, and as of now, there perhaps isn’t sufficient mass of such research in mathematics education to warrant a journal of its own. The Epsiteme series of biennial conferences organized by the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education remains the principal forum for education researchers in mathematics and science to interact with education researchers from around the world.
The education of mathematics teachers is the responsibility of State Governments in the country, overseen and regulated by the National Council of Teacher Education (NCTE), which also provides a National Curriculum Framework for Teacher Education (NCFTE) on which all teacher education curricula are to be based. In the current system, primary school teachers are generalists who obtain a two-year diploma in education after completing 12 years of schooling. Middle school teachers (and in some states, secondary school teachers) have an undergraduate degree specializing in mathematics as well as a two-year degree in education. Higher secondary teachers (and in some states, secondary school teachers) who teach students during the last two years before the university, need to have a disciplinary Masters’ degree, along with a degree in education. (In some states, a disciplinary Masters’ degree alone suffices.)
As it happens, the country is going through a major reform in teacher education: the Union Government has proposed a uniform four-year Integrated Teacher Education Program (ITEP) with a new NCFTE to be published this year. The new ITEP is based on disciplinary specialization as well as stage-wise specialization, with young 17-year old student-teachers entering the stream requiring to choose the discipline and the stage (foundational, preparatory, middle or secondary). There is considerable ongoing discussion in the country, and it is likely to take some time for the new system to settle down, with adoption by different states in their own ways. Teacher education is principally the responsibility of specific TE institutions recognized by the NCTE, including some of the universities. Some states have a separate university for TE, to which the TE institutes are affiliated.
There is little or no research in TE institutes in general, except in a handful of universities that have both prestigious TE programs of their own and carry out extensive research. There is no mandate for research in TE institutions.
As remarked above, every Board of school education in India has its own certification and takes pride in its autonomy to form its own curricula, syllabi and textbooks. While states are linguistically based, there is a considerable population of children with other mother tongues than the official language of the state. Thus, the southern state of Tamil Nadu publishes its textbooks in 8 languages, though they are all translated from Tamil, in which the material is originally produced.
The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) publishes the national curricula, syllabi and standards. Its textbooks are all available online from the site. Most state boards publish their syllabi and textbooks online in downloadable form.
On the website: Indian Mathematics Education Archive you can find various resources about Mathematics Education Curricula, Text books, teacher education and other useful texts and links.
- version June 2025-