Assam plans web portal to monitor madrassas

All madrassas will have to upload location, names and addresses of teachers, and other details

All madrassas in Assam will soon need to upload their locations, names and addresses of teachers, and other details, on a web portal designed to monitor them and prevent them from being misused for “jihadi” activities.

The State’s Director General of Police (DGP), Bhaskar Jyoti Mahanta, said a decision to come up with a portal for maintaining a database of an estimated 1,000 madrassas in Assam was taken after a meeting with some Muslim MLAs and the representatives of four Islamic organisations on September 4.

These organisations — Assam State Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, All Assam Tanzim Madaris Qaumia, Jamiat-e-Ahle Hadith, and Ahle Sunnat Wal Jammat — run a majority of the madrassas in the State.

Mr. Mahanta said the need to monitor the madrassas was felt after some madrassas were found to have been linked to terror groups al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) and the Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT). Three such madrassas in Morigaon and Bongaigaon districts were demolished in August.

“We want to create a master directory of all the madrassas being run in Assam. Many of them are unregistered and unauthorised. Our objective is to prevent anti-India, jihadi elements from utilising the madrassas for their nefarious fundamentalist purposes,” the DGP said.

The Assam government converted some 800 State-run madrassas into regular schools a year ago. This did not affect some 1,000 private madrassas, of which 739 are registered.

The rules followed by the madrassas vary. The organisations running them have been asked to upload the rules of each madrassa online, besides finer details such as the salary paid to each teacher and the number of students.