The National Commission for Minority Educational Institutions, established by an Act of Parliament in 2004 “to provide for matters connected therewith and incidental thereto”, appointed a three member committee headed by Justice (Retd) M.S.A. Siddiqui to make recommendations for the development and upgradation of Muslim education institutions. In May 2007 the committee submitted a proposal for establishing a Central Madarsa Board to the Union ministry of human resource development.

Describing madarsas as “centres of free education” and “bastions of social service”, the committee deplored “orchestrated attempts… to discredit madarsa education with an arbitrarily ascribed and factually baseless association with terrorism”.

The committee identified the major problems of madarsa schools in their current form as being:

• Impediments to economic growth and prosperity of Muslims. “Some clerics don’t want madarsas to flourish because of their vested interests.”

• Their curriculum is “exclusivist and gives rise to fundamentalist tendencies”.

• Some madarsas have introduced modern education but a majority of them don’t offer modern, secular education. “There is no uniform or scientific curriculum, lack of basic infrastructure, teaching equipment… They subsist on small donations and charities and are cash-strapped at all times.”

Therefore to standardise, integrate and mainstream madarsa education, the three-person committee recommended the establishment of a Central Madarsa Board (CMB) modeled on the Delhi-based Central Board of Secondary Education. The committee recommends that affiliation should be voluntary and will facilitate direct admission of madarsa students into mainstream undergrad colleges. Moreover it recommends that government interference is minimised “given the extreme sensitivities and anxieties that lurk in this domain”. The proposed board will be autonomous, free of government interference, established by an Act of Parliament and will not interfere with the religious curriculum of affiliated madarsa schools.

With the Union government having committed itself to providing seed capital of Rs.500 crore, the CMB will be permitted to solicit donations from within the Muslim community in India and abroad. The corpus will be invested in industrial and agro businesses with profits to be ploughed back into the corpus fund.

Other suggestions made by the committee include:

• Salaries of madarsa  teachers and staff (typically peanuts) should be brought on a par with those of government school teachers.

• While theological content of extant madarsas should remain untouched, secular content — science, technology and computers — should be made part of the curriculum.

• Greater use of “modern technology” and “method-ology” for “preparation of textbooks, educational material”, and for “teacher training”.

• Substantial infrastructure improvement.

However the Union government has made it clear that it will not accept the Siddiqui Committee’s CMB proposal until there is a consensus within the Muslim community in favour of establishing the board.

Also read: Case for Central Madarsa Board