Washington latest: Let Americans teach English in Indian madarsas

Highly placed sources said the proposal,which comes about a month after US President Barack Obama’s visit to India,was under examination and would undergo scrutiny of the security agencies.

This is the first such proposal from any foreign country. There are about 7,000 registered madarsas across India,which have over 3.5 lakh students.

The US proposal is reported to have its origins in the visit of Rashad Hussain,US Special Envoy to the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC).

The son of Indian migrants,Hussain made a nine-day trip to India this August during which he visited universities and colleges in Aligarh,Mumbai,Hyderabad,New Delhi and Patna.

Besides university faculty and students,Hussain also met Muslim leaders and government officials to discuss the US administration’s initiatives on education,global health,entrepreneurship and on countering extremism. Hussain’s role,in fact,is said to be critical  to Obama’s agenda to engage with the Muslim world,and his mandate includes helping Washington bridge the cultural divide with Muslims within the US and outside. With India having the second largest Muslim population in the world,engagement with the country’s Muslims figures high on the US agenda.

However,madarsas in India are protected under Section 30 of the Constitution as minority institutions which are free to impart religious education without any interference from the government. The government’s interface with madarsas is largely limited to the centrally-sponsored schemes for providing quality education. The attempt to modernise madarsas through a central madarsa board has not found much support from the Muslim community.

The need to bring madarsa education into the mainstream can be understood from the low enrolment rate of Muslims in higher education. According to a  University Grants Commission (UGC) report on socio-religious enrolment in higher education,the Gross Enrolment Ratio is the highest for Christians at 19.85 per cent,with Hindus second at 13.13 per cent. Muslims come way down in the list at just 7.7 per cent.