Middle school students in private schools code and make phone apps these days; government schools are raising their game too, but in the 3,000-odd madrassas of Delhi the teaching is stuck in the 18th century. The Quran, Urdu and Persian remain main subjects, limiting the job prospects of their roughly 3.6 lakh students.
"They are churning out vast numbers of maulvis, only some of whom can be absorbed into the system," social activist Firoz Bakht Ahmed told TOI. "Others turn into a burden on Muslim society because they have not been trained in such a way as to be an asset to the community."
