West Bengal orders 252 madrasas shut after a June-to-September survey

West Bengal has ordered 252 madrasas to close and has sent show-cause notices to about 100 others after a field survey that ran across every district from early June. Minority Affairs and Madrasah Education Minister Kshudiram Tudu announced the numbers on Sunday. Institutions that hold the required approvals will keep running, he said.

The closures are concentrated in the north and the south of the state. The Times of India, citing the department, put Malda first with around 44 or 45 institutions, North Dinajpur second with about 37, South 24 Parganas third with about 32, and Murshidabad and Nadia at about 25 each. Those five districts account for most of the 252. The survey paid particular attention to Khariji, or unaided, madrasas rather than the recognised government stream.

Tudu described the defects in plain terms. The 252 served with closure notices, he said, lacked minimum infrastructure. That list included missing classroom space, too few students or teachers, and a sharp departure from the state school syllabus or from administrative rules. The 100 that received show-cause notices must reply. If the replies fail, those institutions face the same end as the first group.

The minister framed the policy as a push toward the ordinary school curriculum. “We want madrasa students to pursue modern, mainstream education and shine in life just like students from other schools,” he told the Times of India. That sentence is the government’s public case. The other case, spoken by Panchayati Raj Minister Dilip Ghosh, is security. Ghosh said people arrested in extremist cases had in several instances been working as teachers in such institutions, and that complaints against madrasas had arrived for years. A senior official at Nabanna, quoted by the same paper, said some Khariji madrasas were teaching anti-India material. Those claims have not been published as a named charge sheet attached to the 252 closures. The legal paper that has been published is about approvals and buildings.

Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari ordered the count of authorised and unauthorised madrasas. That instruction is the origin of the June survey. Adhikari leads a state government that replaced the Trinamool Congress administration. The madrasa file has been a political argument in Bengal for more than a decade, usually as an accusation traded between parties rather than as a published inventory. Sunday is the first time this government has put a district-wise closure list into the public record.

What the announcement does not yet say is as useful as what it does. Tudu did not release enrolment figures for the 252 schools, so the number of children who must move is unknown. He did not say where those children will sit on Monday. He did not publish the inspection template, so it is not possible to see how “minimum infrastructure” was scored. The 100 show-cause institutions have a window to answer. Until those replies and any appeals are in, the 252 figure is an order, not a completed transfer of pupils.

The district pattern still tells a story. Malda, Murshidabad, North Dinajpur and Nadia have long had dense networks of unaided religious schools. South 24 Parganas adds a southern belt to the same list. If the department follows through, the next measurable facts will be how many of those buildings are locked, how many teachers lose a salary, and which recognised schools take the children. Those three numbers will decide whether Sunday was an audit or a purge by another name.

Parents in the five leading districts should ask the block education office for the receiving school, in writing, before the next working week starts. The government has said authorised madrasas stay open. That is the only assurance on the record. Everything else depends on a survey whose raw sheets have not been published.