Naeema Batool
Some kinds of harms occur loudly. A house that’s bulldozed is loud. People record it. The newspapers make headlines about it. However, there is some damage that occurs behind the scenes after the cameras have left, and that’s what happened to the children of Bari Imam. The Capital Development Authority (CDA) demolished the houses in January 2026 near the Bari Imam shrine in Islamabad. Thousands of families were left with no home. Many had resided there for ten or twenty years, even 30 years. But this isn’t really a story about houses. It is a tale of what went on after with the children who were to be in school that week. Nearly 63 of every 100 families received NO advance warning before homes were destroyed. The law requires 30 days’ notice to be provided to every household, but of the 35 households surveyed, more than half received no such notification at all and others received less than one week notice. And in 97 out of 100 cases, the eviction happened while school was still going on. Children were caught in the middle of a school term when their home, school bag, school uniform, and even school papers (documents like B-form) were lost. Here’s what really should be disturbing us. Of these families, 56 children simply ceased to attend school, and 97 children were involved in these families. More than half, but no one knows. No government office has a record of it. On queries from the Ministry of Education, it was stated that there had been no formal complaint so far. Of course there’s not an application for that: “My child’s school year was lost as the house was demolished.” This doesn’t mean that nothing bad has happened. It is evidence that there is no system in place to even notice it. This is an exception to other failures of the government. When something goes wrong, it is always due to the failure to observe well a good rule. That’s not the way it is; there was never a rule about education during evictions anyway. The discussion of housing in Pakistan’s policy is related to land and buildings and legal ownership. It didn’t ask once, ‘“What happens if we bulldoze a child’s home on a random Tuesday afternoon?” The constitution of Pakistan guarantees free education to all children between the ages of 5 and 16. But for a child to reap the benefits of that promise, she must have a home address, her school records must be locatable, and there must be a school within reach. All three are lost in one day with an eviction, and no one follows up to repair them. Much worse than there being no plan is the thought that officials seemed to be confident that everything was fine. Islamabad’s schools were well positioned to accept these children from both the CDA and the Ministry of Education. But this confidence was not one that rested on the comparison; this confidence was one that rested on the fact that no one had complained. One official, from the Pakistan Planning and Management Institute, could only speak the truth: there is no policy on this. Not a single poor policy. None at all. One part of the issue is that it’s an inter-departmental issue. Evictions dealt with by one authority. Under a completely different ministry of education. If resettlement occurs, it is done in a different office. Each one can say “This isn’t my job,” and they would be correct. But the child is a part of all three and comes to be looked after by none. This could easily be perceived as happening only in Bari Imam. It didn’t. In Islamabad alone, there are 63 informal settlements, where families have resided for longer than many of the laws that are supposed to protect them. Each and every one of those communities could experience what Bari Imam experienced, a full school year wasted, not because families are poor but because the government demolished their homes. There’s no big complex patch to fix this. It requires something smaller but harder; officials prepared to ask before the bulldozers arrive where the kids go to school next week and how many kids live here. The fundamental guideline: Keep a record of how many children live there, how many go to school, and, in the future, how they will continue their studies after such an eviction. One office tasked with following up on a displaced child’s education, rather than three officers each taking responsibility for the others. They’re not outlandish requests. The absence of this is not a gap, but rather it’s been over 10 years since researchers (Mujeeb and Zubair 2012) asked to study this. It’s a choice made quietly by not choosing it. It was not as though the houses of the children of Bari Imam were razed and they disappeared. They were no longer anybody’s responsibility. No one may have signed the decision, but the consequences were unmistakeable.
