“The world outside knows a different Deoband and probably has a different impression of the Darul Uloom. But people here know it as a centre for excellence that has taken the development of the region forward,” says Dinesh Chandra, Sub-Divisional Magistrate.

The tehsil has a pucca road to each of its 237 villages and the town’s main road can put Delhi’s to shame. Two cellphone towers mark the skyline of the town along with the minarets of the Darul Uloom mosque.

“Even with these cellphone towers, there has been a long communication gap,” says Nawaz Deobandi, poet and chief controller at the ITI. “The world,” he says, “has failed to reach out to the Darul Uloom.”

“Socho! Aakhir kab sochenge? (Think! When are we finally going to do that?),” Nawaz Deobandi quotes from one of his own poems.