KARACHI: The Sindh security administration found no existence of more than 2,000 registered seminaries on ground which they believe were brought on government record only to collect donations and funding from different sources, official sources told Dawn on Sunday.

This has been revealed during a recent survey jointly carried out by police’s two units namely the Special Branch and the Counter-Terrorism Department.

This ongoing survey was being conducted to ascertain the number of madaris (seminaries) allegedly involved in promoting extremism and sectarianism in order to keep check on their activities.

“We have detected a total of 2,096 seminaries, which on papers have been shown as registered in Sindh, but actually they are closed or are not available,” disclosed additional inspector general of police, CTD, Dr Sanaullah Abbasi.

The senior police officer described these seminaries as ‘ghost’ and said that they had been registered merely to get donations and funding from different sources.

Out of such ghost seminaries, at least 639 seminaries have been detected in Karachi division only followed by Hyderabad (843), Mirpurkhas (192), Sukkur (364) and Larkana divisions (58).

The police counterterrorism unit chief pointed out that there were a total of 10,222 seminaries in Sindh. Out of them, 1,491 were unregistered. As many as 1,185 seminaries have not been registered in Karachi division, 175 in Hyderabad, 53 in Mirpurkhas, 18 in Sukkur and 60 in Larkana.

“If you take the number of closed or not available seminaries, it brings the total number of seminaries to 8,126 in Sindh,” the CTD head said.

Out of total seminaries, after reduction of the closed and not available one, Dr Sanaullah Abbasi said that geotagging of 7,495 had been done so far while 631 were pending with senior superintendents of police of districts concerned.

Schools security

Police Special Branch and the CTD have also completed a survey of 39,373 educational institutes out of total 56,498 institutes in Sindh while efforts were under way to conduct the survey of remaining 17,125 institutes, said Dr Abbasi.

Out of total 10,475 educational institutes in Karachi only, the survey of 4,071 has been completed for security purpose so far.

Published in Dawn, March 28th, 2016