Christian missionary schools in the city are up in arms against the National Council for Minority Educational Institutions for its letter seeking figures on the enrolment of Christian students.

The representatives of the founder bodies of the schools held a meeting recently and decided not to provide the data to the commission, a quasi-judicial body under the central government.

“We have been asked by our management not to entertain the NCMEI instructions,” said Terence Ireland, the principal of St James School, which functions under the Church of North India.

The letter signed by Mohammad Kamal, the state coordinator of the commission, seeks to know how many Christian students are studying in the schools and the number of students from the community admitted this year.

The missionary bodies are aggrieved as they feel it’s beyond the panel’s jurisdiction to ask for such figures. “The commission is only empowered to receive and investigate complaints of violation of minority rights,” said an official of a missionary organisation that runs schools in the city.

The organisations also questioned the authority of the commission’s state coordinator to send such a letter.

“We would have entertained the letter had it come directly from the commission’s head office in Delhi,” said Father Moloy D’Costa, the education officer of the Roman Catholic schools under the Archdiocese of Calcutta.

Panel coordinator Kamal, however, has expressed “shock” at the way the schools have reacted to his letter.

“It was not my personal decision to seek detailed enrolment figures from the Christian missionary schools. I wrote the letter following instructions from the commission headquarters in Delhi,” said Kamal.

A member of the commission’s coordination committee, who did not want to be named, said most Christian schools had “very few” students from the community on their rolls, a fact the institutions “want to suppress”.

The commission, the apex watchdog for minority education, was recently at loggerheads with the missionaries following its announcement that minority educational institutions would be robbed of their special status if they failed to enrol at least 30 per cent students from their respective communities.

The founder bodies of the 700-plus Christian schools across the state had planned to launch a movement against the commission’s decision but the panel later said such conditions would not be imposed on the institutions.

Herod Mullick, the general secretary of Bangiya Christiya Pariseba, said since Christians were barely one per cent of the state’s population, it would be “unfair” to expect Christian schools to have 30 per cent students from the community.