UP Madrasa Teachers' Protest For Six Years Of Unpaid Salaries Continues Amid Extreme Starvation, Death

Thousands of madrasa teachers from all over Uttar Pradesh are travelling to the state capital, Lucknow, to be a part of an ongoing protest demanding six years worth of their pending salaries to be paid. The protest, which started on December 18 at Lucknow's Eco Park, is now in its 52nd day, showing no signs of abating. 

About 21,216 madrasa teachers from 7442 madrasas in Uttar Pradesh have not received their payments under the Scheme for Providing Education to Madrasas/Minorities (SPEMM) for the past six years. SPEMM is an umbrella scheme which contains the sub-schemes - Scheme for Providing Quality Education in Madrasas (SPQEM) and Infrastructure Development of Minority Institutes (IDMI). While SPQEM focuses on integrating modern subjects like English, Hindi, maths and science to the curriculum and improving educational quality within madrasas, IDMI aims to support infrastructure development.

The teachers, who had initially started the protest to demand a pending total payment of 1628.46 crores, intensified their protest upon learning that the Yogi Adityanath government had terminated the honorarium— or “additional payments” of Rs 2,000 and Rs 3,000 for graduate and postgraduate teachers, respectively. The honorarium had been announced by the Akhilesh Yadav government in 2016 following allegations by the teachers that their salary disbursal was “irregular”.

On Monday, the 50th day of the protest, the teachers marched to the Vidhan Sabha but were stopped by the police and taken back to Eco Park. Madrasa Aadhunikaran Shikshak Ekta Samiti State President Ashraf Ali, who was leading the protest, stated in a press release that Minority Welfare and Waqf Department deputy director R P Singh and Uttar Pradesh Madrassa Board registrar Priyanka Awasthi were called to scene outside Vidhan Sabha to discuss the protesting teachers’ demands. However, the teachers remained adamant on meeting with CM Yogi Adityanath.

Five madrasa teachers in UP have lost their lives due to extreme starvation and illness since the protest began in December, and about 200 teachers have died in the six years that they have not been paid, Ashraf Ali stated in his press release.

How it all started

In 1993, the Centre launched the Madrasa Modernisation Scheme to integrate modern subjects such as Mathematics, Science, Hindi, English, and Social Studies into the madrasa students’ curriculum. As a result, teachers specialising in these modern subjects were appointed.

The scheme was renamed SPEMM in 2014-15, and teachers' salaries were set at Rs 6,000 for graduates and Rs 12,000 for postgraduates.

However, when teachers raised concerns about irregularities in payment, the state government introduced an honorarium. Teachers allege that they have not received any payments since 2017 and have relied on the honorarium for their sustenance.

Protestors' demands

Madrasa Aadhunikaran Shikshak Ekta Samiti State President Ashraf Ali, popularly known as Sikander Baba, has been at the protest everyday for the past 52 days.

"I’m the coordinator for the protest and I have seen thousands of teachers from every part of UP come and go. Some teachers don’t even have enough money to be able to afford two meals and they have come. This is how helpless we feel, we are completely ruined,” Ashraf Ali said in an interview with Outlook.

For the past 17 years, Ali has dedicated himself to teaching Hindi in a madrasa in Bahraich. The occupation has sustained him for numerous years, yet recently, circumstances have become exceedingly challenging.

"We stopped receiving the honorarium in April, we thought it would come but it didn’t. And now we have been told the honorarium has been terminated,” he said.

"The teachers have been teaching for 10, 20, 25 years, they don’t know how to do anything else. Now without any income they are being forced to find other ways of income. Some are providing private tuition, some have been selling fruits and vegetables on the roadside.”

The modernisation scheme, Ali says, was beneficial to both teachers and students, and now that the teachers won’t be paid, there will be no one in madrasas to teach these modern subjects to the students

"Teachers’ lives have already been ruined and now the madrasa students' lives will also be ruined. Now when the payment has been discontinued, a lot of madrasas don’t have the capacity to be able to pay the teachers their end. The children’s future is at risk because a lot of them can't afford expensive schools and depend on these government funded madrasas for education.”

Both the teachers and students, he added, weren’t just from the Muslim community, a lot of them were also Hindus.

“The government is not even batting an eye. Those who are poor and should be helped are actually the ones being exploited,” he said.

Former Madrasa teacher from Balrampur, Mohammad Saleem, has given up waiting around for payment and has opened up a small shop. 

“I taught Hindi for about 16 years but about six to seven months ago I quit because the pending money just wasn’t coming,” Mohammed Saleem said.

Saleem says the SPQEM scheme was initially being paid for by the Centre, however, in recent years was transferred to the Ministry of Minority Affairs (MOMA). “The scheme was running well under the Ministry of Human Resources Development, no one knows what occurred to them, they transferred it to MOMA and MOMA couldn’t run it. A few years later, Yogi Adityanath received a letter from the centre, it said the centre could no longer pay the salaries in full and asked the state to pay 40 per cent and they would pay 60 per cent. This arrangement of shared payment was to come into effect from 2018-19. The state government actually agreed and passed the budget as well.”

“I think the 60 per cent from Delhi hasn’t come in the past six years and the condition was that if the centre doesn’t release the 60 per cent, the state wouldn’t pay 40 per cent.”

While no formal announcement has been made, Saleem says that the scheme has been permanently suspended. “A letter came from the centre about six to seven months ago about this. The website however is still running the scheme, they are advertising that they are still running it but if that’s the case, where’s our money?”

“In the present times it is the politics of religion. I'm not saying that anyone wants to harm us, it’s just that they want to show that they are favouring one community,” Saleem said.

Letters sent

On January 10, Chairman of Uttar Pradesh Board of Madarsa Education and also the National Secretary of the BJP Minority Front, Dr Iftikhar Ahmed wrote a letter to the PM Narendra Modi urging him to renew the Madrasa Modernisation Scheme and to pay the pending salaries.

Citing Modi’s popular slogan encouraging Muslim youths to have “Quran in one hand and computer in the other”, Dr Iftikhar Ahmed Javed said the SPQEM scheme had been successful in connecting lakhs and crores of madrasa students to mainstream education and society.

He added the scheme had helped in providing employment to thousands of teachers and the teachers had been proud of their work and had been working without payment with the hope that their outstanding salaries would soon be paid.

Referring to a government letter which cited approval of the Madrasa Modernisation Scheme only until the financial year 2021-22, he requested for the scheme to be renewed. 

UP Commission for Minorities president Ashfaq Saifi in his letter to Yogi Adityanath dated September 2021, had outlined the poor state of the madrasa teachers especially during the COVID-19 lockdown.

“The central share (honorarium) has not been paid to the Madrasa Modernization teachers working in Uttar Pradesh for the last 53 months, due to which the situation of the Madrasa Modernization teachers, who are already facing financial crisis, has worsened due to the lockdown,” the letter read.

“More than 100 Madrasa Modernization teachers have died due to Corona outbreak, heart attack and lack of treatment. Teachers are forced to lead a life of starvation…the future of teachers is bleak.”