Non-affiliated madrasas to come under mass education programme

Kolkata, Nov 20 (UNI) All the non-affilliated madrasas in West Bengal would come under the 'Sarva Siksha Abhiyan' (mass education) programme.

This would bring parity in syllabi of the non-affilliated madrasas, Minister for Minority Affairs and Madrasas Abdus Sattar said today.

To questions in the Assembly, he said all District Collectors had been asked to submit detailed lists of both affilliated and non-affilliated madrasas to enable the government to take necessary steps.

Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee had already said in the House that the government would make sure that there was parity between the syllabi of affilliated and non-affilliated madrasas, he said.

Stating that Rs ten crore was being spent on development of infrastructure and improvment of the teacher-student ratio, Sattar said vocational education had been introduced in 42 affilliated madrasas.

Plans were on to take the number of such madrasas to 100 in the coming academic year.

The government had no plan to teach science subjects in Arabic, but it was taking steps to ensure teaching of Arabic and Urdu as language subjects as demanded, he said adding he had no information that Bengali was being ignored as a language at the cost of Arabic.

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