West Bengal orders 252 madrassas shut after a statewide approval survey

West Bengal has ordered 252 madrassas to close and sent show-cause notices to about 100 more after a survey that ran from early June across all districts. Minority Affairs and Madrasah Education minister Kshudiram Tudu said on 13 September that the 252 lack minimum infrastructure and the required approvals. The 100 must reply. If the replies fail, they will face action too. Approved institutions, he said, will keep running.

Chief minister Suvendu Adhikari had asked the department to establish how many madrassas operate with authorisation and how many do not. Officials told The Indian Express that 2,132 madrassas have proper approval and 2,396 function without permission from a government board or the required authority. The survey logged management, teachers, students, buildings, funding and syllabus.

Malda, on the Bangladesh border, accounts for about 45 of the closure notices. Uttar Dinajpur has about 37. South 24 Parganas, Murshidabad and Nadia have about 25 each on some official breakdowns. Those five districts sit on or near the state's Muslim-majority belts and the international line.

Tudu said the government wants madrassa students on the same modern syllabus as other schools. A senior official at Nabanna, speaking to the Times of India, said investigators found "anti-India education" and "brainwashing" in a number of Khariji, or unrecognised, madrassas, and that this finding helped drive the survey. Panchayati Raj minister Dilip Ghosh said people arrested in extremist cases had in some instances been working as teachers in such institutions. Those claims are political statements from the new BJP government. They are not, in the material released on 13 September, a published case-by-case charge sheet against the 252 named schools.

The infrastructure grounds are more specific. Officials listed missing classroom space, too few students or teachers, and deviation from the state school syllabus or from administrative rules. Khariji madrassas were the focus of field checks. Recognised, aided madrassas that hold the papers are outside the closure list.

The BJP took West Bengal in 2026. Adhikari is chief minister. The madrassa file is one of the first large administrative acts of that government in the minority-education department. Opposition parties and madrassa boards have not yet filed a consolidated legal reply in the first news cycle. Families in Malda and Murshidabad will now need a place for children who were on those 252 rolls.

The next papers that matter are the show-cause replies, any stay orders from the Calcutta High Court, and a published list of the 252 institutions. Until that list is public, the policy is a headline number. The number is large enough to move enrolment in five districts. The legal test will be whether "minimum infrastructure" and "approval" were applied on a common checklist or on a political one.

Khariji madrassas sit outside the aided system. They raise their own funds and set more of their own timetable. That is why a survey that asks for approval papers will find hundreds of them short. The 2,396 unauthorised figure, if it holds, is larger than the 252 already told to close. The show-cause stack of 100 is the middle band: some papers, not enough building, or a syllabus the department now calls a deviation.

Adhikari's government is three months old. A closure order this large, concentrated in Malda and the other border districts, will be read as education policy and as a signal to the state's Muslim organisations. Courtrooms in Kolkata will see the first petitions once the 252 names are on a list a lawyer can annex. Until then the department has a number, a minister's sentence about mainstream syllabus, and a map that leans toward the north and the border.