Madarsa teachers welcome allocation

LUCKNOW: UP Madarsa Teachers have welcomed the Yogi Adityanath government’s move allocating ₹459 crore for modernization of Arabi-Farsi madarsas saying it was a positive step in the right direction.

The Yogi Government has pledged another ₹942 crore (up from ₹741 crore last year) scholarship scheme for the students belonging to minority communities. “It’s a welcome step. We hope the funds would be utilized to provide modern education and improve teaching infrastructure as also the condition of ‘madrasa’ teachers,” said Mohd Farooq, who runs a madarsa on Lucknow-Sitapur highway.

Some 20,000 contractual madarsa teachers, who have been agitating for the past several months now for not being paid their salary, said they were hopeful that the Centre too would take the initiative and release their dues. “The introduction of NCERT text books and subjects like math, English and Hindi has improved the overall teaching standards and madarsas also had access now to computer education,” said Abdullah, the state coordinator of All India Teachers’ Association of Madarsa Arabia.

Many Muslims, however, felt let down and disappointed with the budget. “The biggest budget has no scheme for the welfare and uplift of the community. We were hoping that the government would announce some steps that would help alleviate the lot of the community,” said Ejaz Farooqui, who runs an NGO, which provides financial assistance to poor Muslim students who cannot afford school fee.

He said the findings of the Sachar Committee and Rangnath Mishra Commission reports on the plight of the Muslim community should have served as an eye-opener but sadly successive governments had done nothing on their recommendations.