Despite the right to education being deeply rooted in India’s constitutional principles, due to bureaucratic hurdles, juristic uncertainties, and socio-political considerations, thousands of Rohingya refugee children in India are being denied the opportunity to seek education.
The Rohingya, Myanmar’s ethnic minority, have suffered for decades, being stateless, forced to flee, and subjected to systematic persecution. Escalating violence since 2012 in Myanmar’s Rakhine state forced thousands of Rohingya families to flee and take refuge in neighboring nations, including India. As of 2017, there were about 40,000 Rohingya refugees in India, with large concentrations in Delhi, Jammu, Haryana, Rajasthan, and Telangana. As of 2024, just over 22,000 Rohingya refugees in India were registered with the UNHCR. But being “illegal migrants” and not “refugees”, under legal categorisation, they are usually deprived of fundamental rights, such as education for their children.
The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009, giving free and compulsory education to all children between the age group of 6 and 14 years, in principle encompasses all “persons” within the territorial jurisdiction of India. But Rohingya children are de facto denied because they do not have identity documents, are opposed by local governments, and are negatively affected due to changing government policies. As important as the global human rights instruments such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), 1989, are in pointing out the universality of the right to education, India’s absence of a national mechanism of protection for refugees has led to state and institution-level inconsistency regarding policy.
