ISLAMABAD, Aug 12: The cabinet has directed the ministries of religious affairs and education to speed up madressah reforms programme to avoid repeat of a Lal Masjid-like situation in any part of the country.

Sources said a recent meeting of the federal cabinet was informed that the reforms programme initiated by the government a few years ago for mainstreaming religious educational institutions had not moved with the reasonable pace.The need for re-invigorating the programme was realised after the Lal Masjid episode that left scores of people dead and exposed law and order situation in the capital and overall reforms initiative.

The ministries of education, religious affairs and interior openly held other responsible for the slow pace of the programme that was initiated about six years ago at a cost of about Rs6 billion.

Sources said the prime minister was likely to preside over a meeting of the three ministries - interior, education and religious affairs - in the next few days to try to remove their operational difference and control over the programme.

Not only that the programme had not progressed, in some cases, beyond initial registration process, a large number of religious schools even declined to provide basic information to the government in a recently concluded census on seminaries.

Sources quoted the prime minister as telling his cabinet colleagues that there should be no concern over the role of madressah who were playing a very useful role in imparting religious education, and the government in fact would like them to continue with shouldering government’s responsibility in providing education to the poor. But there was need to ensure that a handful of extremists did not penetrate them to influence towards militancy and extremism.

The prime minister would sit with the three stakeholders to take steps for accelerating mainstreaming of religious studies with modern education to end the tendency of extremism among the students.

The prime objective of the madressah reforms was to bring such institutions on par with regular school system of the country by introducing modern subjects from primary to intermediate level, although the Lal Masjid saga proved that the dream was far from becoming reality.

There were 1.5 million students enrolled with the 13,000 madressahs in country, according to a last year National Education Census. This year, more than 800 seminaries have declined to provide any data to the enumerators of the National Education Census whose results are yet to be made public, said the sources.

No more than 600 schools could so far been involved in the reform process and a major amount of the allocated funds still remain unconsumed. Ever increasing trust deficit between the government and the five Wafaqs, slow verification process by the ministry of interior and a tug of war between the federal and provincial governments over implementations were some of the reasons for the programme’s failure as the US administration continues to push the government for reducing education hours for religious subjects.

The US linked the increased religious extremism with the madressah education system.