The recommendation of the national commission for minority educational institutions to establish a Central Madarsa Board to standardise the disparate and often arbitrary syllabuses of the countrys 30,000 madarsa schools, has aroused the opposition of orthodox Muslim clergy. Puja Awasthi reports from LucknowThere is a growing sense of unease in the ranks of Indian liberals and Muslim intellectuals across the country, that the much debated subject of reforming Indias Muslim minority schools which provide — or are supposed to provide primary and secondary education to an estimated 1.1 million children of the countrys 150 million strong Muslim population — is disappearing off the national radar screen. According to a front page news report in the Kolkata-based daily Telegraph (June 27), the prime ministers office (PMO) has sent a stinging raspberry to the Union human resource development ministry accusing it of repeatedly delaying recommendations of a high-level committee to modernise madarsa school education. Over a year ago a three-member committee headed by Justice (Retd) M.S.A. Siddiqui had submitted a detailed proposal for liberal provision of secular mainstream (English, science, maths, computer science etc) education in Muslim madarsa schools, which provide religious and variable secular education to over 1 million children of the minority community. With a general election looming on the horizon, there is a new, even if belated urgency to introduce mainstream or vocationally oriented education for children of the countrys Muslim minority, which is a massive vote bank. Indisputably, Indias Muslim minority, which ruled the subcontinent for three centuries during which it assimilated with the indigenous population and greatly enriched Indian culture and performing arts, needs all the help it can get to raise itself up to become full, contributing citizens of secular India. The pathetic socio-economic condition to which the Muslim community — barring a thin upper crust — has been reduced, was recently highlighted by a report of the Prime Ministers High Level Committee on Social, Economic and Educational Status of the Muslim Community of India (more popularly known as the Sachar Committee after its chairman Justice (Retd) Rajinder Sachar), submitted in November 2006. The first comprehensive study of its kind, it details just how poorly Muslims are situationed in comparison with the majority community and other religious and social minorities. According to the Sachar Committees report, only 59.1 percent of the countrys Muslim population is literate, significantly lower than the national average of 65.1 percent; against a mean of four years of schooling, Muslim children complete only three years and four months in school; one of every four (25 percent) Muslim children has never attended school; at the tertiary level, only one of 25 undergraduate and one of every 50 postgraduate students is Muslim, and only 6.3 and 6.8 percent of the countrys Muslim citizens are graduates and diploma holders — a statistic which compares unfavourably against the historically deprived and discriminated scheduled castes and scheduled tribes languishing at the very base of the Hindu caste hierarchy. This education deprivation is reflected in the employment profile…
