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Indian state cuts pay for 21,000 teachers at Muslim religious schools: ‘students will go back by 30 years’
- The decision affects more than 21,000 teachers in Uttar Pradesh
- The incident comes as authorities in Assam state convert hundreds of Muslim religious schools into conventional schools
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Authorities in India’s most populous state halted some payments this week to teachers of subjects such as mathematics and science in Muslim religious schools, known as madrasas, after the end of a federal government scheme.
The funding halt, affecting more than 21,000 teachers in Uttar Pradesh, comes as the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which took office in 2014, sets its sights on winning a third straight term in general elections due by May.
According to a document seen by Reuters, India stopped funding the scheme in March 2022, having halted approvals of new proposals four years earlier.
The decision to stop this scheme will take us back to where we started
But it was not immediately clear why the state government has only now stopped paying its share.
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“The decision to stop this scheme will take us back to where we started,” Iftikhar Ahmed Javed, the chief of the state’s madrasa education board, told Reuters. “Muslim students and teachers will go back by 30 years.”
The office of Modi, whose government raised funding for the programme to a record of about 3 billion rupees (US$36 million) in the financial year that ended in March 2016, did not respond to a request for comment.
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India’s minority affairs ministry, which ran the programme until it was closed, also did not respond to an email.
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