The Start of the 2025 School Year in Balochistan: Discrimination, Poverty, and Deprivation Under Systemic Policies
As the 2025 school year begins, the dire situation of Baloch students in Sistan and Balochistan once again comes to the surface. Denial of education, lack of infrastructure, life-threatening transportation conditions, and the absence of legal identity documents have placed Baloch children in a position where their fundamental right to education is gravely endangered.
Lives at Risk on the Way to School
In many rural and even urban areas of Balochistan, due to the lack of safe and reliable school transportation, Baloch children are forced to rely on passing vehicles, pickup trucks, cargo lorries, and even fuel-smuggling cars to reach school. These unsafe conditions have repeatedly led to deadly accidents and injuries.
Although state officials claim that schemes such as the “Central Village School Transport Project” are in place, the reality on the ground shows that only a small portion of students benefit from such services, leaving many families no choice but to send their children to school in unsafe conditions.
Lack of Schools and Teachers
The shortage of schools, insufficient numbers of teachers, and the absence of basic educational facilities have denied many Baloch children access to learning. In some areas, children must walk long distances to reach the nearest school. Combined with widespread poverty, these conditions drive high dropout rates and widespread educational deprivation.
The Stateless Crisis
Thousands of Baloch children are denied schooling because they lack birth certificates or national ID cards. This issue of statelessness goes far beyond access to education: these children and their families are excluded from the most basic social, medical, and economic rights. Even their marriages and children’s births often remain legally unrecognized.
Instead of addressing the crisis through humane and legal measures, the government has adopted a securitized approach, with many undocumented Baloch threatened with arrest, detention in foreign nationals’ camps, and even deportation to Afghanistan — a country many of them have never seen.
Poverty and Structural Discrimination
Available data highlights the depth of structural discrimination in Balochistan:
Over 70% of the population lives below the poverty line.
Unemployment rates in some areas reach 30%.
Around 60% of the population lacks access to safe drinking water.
Nearly 40% of children are deprived of education.
These figures point to systemic marginalization and decades of state neglect that have placed immense pressure on the daily lives of the Baloch people.
Denial of Mother-Tongue Education
Education in one’s mother tongue is a basic human right. Yet Baloch children are deprived of this right and forced to begin their schooling in a non-native language. This not only hinders their learning but also contributes to cultural and linguistic erasure.
🔻 The Balochistan Human Rights Group stresses that the right to education for all children, without discrimination, must be guaranteed. The continuation of discriminatory policies, the denial of mother-tongue education, and the deprivation of stateless children constitute clear violations of human rights, for which the Islamic Republic of Iran bears direct responsibility.
