Daily Times, August 19, 2005
India’s madrassas 3 x Pakistan’s
By Iftikhar Gilani
NEW DELHI: India outdoes Pakistan in the number of madrassas or Islamic seminaries operating within it. In Pakistan, there are just 10,000 registered madrassas, but in India, 27,518 registered Islamic seminaries dot the country except for a few states.
According to a reply filed by the government in response to a question in the parliament on Thrusday, the states without madrassas are Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Pondicherry and Jammu and Kashmir – a surprising occurrence since the state is India’s only Muslim dominated region.
The states of Kerala and Madhya Pradesh have the most number of madrassas with 6,000 in each. They are followed by Uttar Pradesh (4,292), Bihar (4,102), Rajasthan (1,985) and Gujarat (1,727). Even remote areas like the Andaman and Nicobar Islands have 54 madrassas. The states of Sikkim and Goa have only one registered seminary each. The government report says that the state government of Jammu and Kashmir intimated that there were no madrassas, but the State Wakf Board was running 86 private schools.
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