Two Lakh Madrasa Teachers Left Without May Salaries as Ministry Fund Runs Dry

Massive financial uncertainty has loomed over approximately 191,000 Monthly Pay Order (MPO) enrolled teachers and staff across the country's private madrasas. Due to a sudden budget exhaustion within the Technical and Madrasa Education Division (TMED), these educators are highly unlikely to receive their salaries for the month of May within the ongoing month of June.

According to institutional data, Bangladesh currently has 8,229 MPO-enlisted madrasas, comprising 5,767 Dakhil, 1,285 Alim, 993 Fazil, and 184 Kamil-tier institutions. None of the employees working across this massive network have received their due payouts for May. While ministry officials claim to have sent an urgent Demi-Official (DO) letter to the Ministry of Finance to release special funds, administrative bottlenecks indicate a prolonged delay.

The crisis stems from a mixture of administrative delays and standard fiscal year closure procedures. Officials from both TMED and the Directorate of Madrasa Education (DME) revealed that the payroll sheets for May were fully prepared prior to the Eid-ul-Adha holidays. The standard protocol required sending the sheets to the ministry for clearance before government offices closed for the festival.

However, DME Director General (Additional Charge) Md. Obaidul Haque reportedly withheld the files, preventing them from being submitted to the ministry before the holidays. Following the break, when the proposal was finally pushed forward in June, the allocation was rejected due to a lack of available funds.

Sources explained that at the start of June, the Ministry of Finance automatically swept and recalled all unspent operational balances from individual ministerial divisions. This is a standard macro-budgetary process enforced across all ministries prior to the passage of the new national budget, where remaining balances are rolled back into the central national exchequer. Consequently, TMED's internal salary account was wiped completely clean before the salary bills could clear.

An official from the DME, speaking on condition of anonymity, noted that because the national budget has already been formulated, the likelihood of a special emergency cash release within this fiscal month is extremely minimal. Education and Primary and Mass Education Minister Dr. A N M Ehsanul Hoque Milan declined to comment when approached regarding the unpaid salaries.

To mitigate the fallout, TMED Secretary Md. Dawood Miah dispatched an urgent DO letter to Finance Secretary Dr. Md. Khairuzzaman Mozumder over eight days ago, requesting immediate emergency interventions. The letter argued that a recent mass recruitment drive by the Non-Government Teachers Registration and Certification Authority (NTRCA), which added 17,000 new madrasa teachers to the state payroll, had suddenly triggered an unpredicted budget deficit.

However, this justification has been sharply contested by the Secondary and Higher Education Division (SHED), which operates within the same broader framework. Officials from SHED noted that thousands of new NTRCA teachers were similarly integrated into regular schools and colleges under their jurisdiction, yet those institutions cleared their staff salaries on schedule without hitting any fiscal deficits.

A senior official from SHED characterized the madrasa sector's budget shortfall as an unacceptable administrative oversight rather than an external recruitment issue. The official pointed out that any mid-year workforce expansions are legally required to be accounted for during the mandatory supplementary budget evaluations in November, meaning the current deficit is a direct result of internal accounting mismanagement.

Clearing the single-month salary backlog for the 191,000 stranded madrasa employees requires an immediate fund injection of approximately Tk 550 crore. Despite the ongoing deadlock, junior officials at the Ministry of Finance indicated that attempts are being made to find a workaround.

Commenting on the stalemate, Shihab Uddin Ahmad, Deputy Secretary of the Budget-2 Branch under the Finance Division, stated that if a formal DO letter has been logged with the secretariat, a resolution path remains possible, though final authorization rests entirely with the senior leadership. Finance Secretary Dr. Md. Khairuzzaman Mozumder and DME Director General Md. Obaidul Haque both remained unavailable for comment despite multiple contact attempts via telephone and digital messaging.