The Uttarakhand Madrasa Board is planning to introduce Sanskrit education on an optional basis in over 400 madrasas across the state.
“We have been working on the plan for some time. A proposal is being prepared which will be implemented if we get the go-ahead from the state government,” the board’s chairman Mufti Shamoon Qasmi told PTI on Thursday.
It is in keeping with Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami’s wish to link madrasa-going children with mainstream education, he said. “Introduction of the NCERT syllabus in madrasas of the state produced very good results this year with the pass percentage being over 96 percent. It shows there is no dearth of talent among students attending madrasas. Given an opportunity, they might excel in all subjects including Sanskrit,” the Madrasa board chairman said.
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Both Arabic and Sanskrit are ancient languages. If madrasa students have the option of learning Sanskrit alongside Arabic, it will be beneficial for them, Qasmi said. Whereas the board’s registrar Shahid Shami Siddiqui said Sanskrit education in madrasas is still an idea awaiting implementation.
When asked whether a proposal in this regard is being prepared by the board, he said it has not yet been brought to his notice. Uttarakhand Waqf Board Chairman Shadab Shams also said the idea of introducing Sanskrit education in madrasas is good but wondered what was stopping the madrasa board from implementing it. “They can do it easily if they really want it. I do not think they will face any hurdle in getting a clearance from the state government for something like this,” he said.
Shams also said that under his chairmanship, the Waqf Board had come up with the idea of ‘modern madrasas’ some time back to free children attending traditional madrasas from the confines of strictly theological education and give them access to “normal education” of the kind provided by schools in general.
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“I feel theological education is important. But confining children to religious education only, as traditional madrasas have been doing, amounts to playing with their future. It means throttling their potential and shutting the avenues of their future growth,” the Waqf Board chairman told PTI.
Madrasas can keep an hour for religious education every day but making students read only religious texts all day and not letting them learn anything else will cripple them, he said. Providing science and computer education to Madrasa-going children was central to Shams’ idea of ‘modern madrasas’ which he came up with soon after taking over as the chairman of the board in September 2022.
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