Crumbling classrooms, extreme poverty, and child fuel carriers expose the human cost of the regime’s long-standing neglect in Iran’s southeast.
A visit to Saravan reveals a landscape where time seems to have stopped, and where deprivation has become a defining feature of daily life. The schools in this southeastern region operate on budgets so small they defy belief.
Each school receives roughly 3.8 million tomans per year—an amount that does not even reach four million, and one that is insufficient to cover the cost of white paper needed to photocopy exam questions.
School administrators must stretch this meager sum across an entire academic year, paying for electricity, water, and basic repairs while attempting to keep their institutions functioning. The buildings themselves are worn to the core.
Blackened, peeling walls crumble at a touch, and heavy wooden or crude iron doors evoke the feeling of prisons rather than spaces meant for learning.
Inside the classrooms, dim light filters through broken windows onto old, battered desks. Many of the boys who sit in these rooms divide their time between school and the perilous work of fuel smuggling across the border.
Locally they are called sookhtbar, not because they lack names—Abdolvahed, Naeem, Osman, Shakour, Mohammad, Omar—but because they are children forced into adult risks to help their families survive.
Their lives hover between the classroom and the gas pedal, in constant danger of fatal accidents when overloaded vehicles crash or catch fire on the narrow border roads.
The conditions of these schools reflect decades of systematic neglect from a regime that has consistently marginalized regions such as Sistan and Baluchestan. One school still in use is more than eighty-four years old and lacks even basic sanitation.
Students must either endure the entire day without access to a toilet or run home in distress. This year, one child unable to hold himself wet his clothes, then climbed over the wall in humiliation and fled the school.
Such incidents illustrate not only the physical decay but the emotional and psychological burden placed on children who deserve dignity and safety.
The crisis in Saravan is not a natural consequence of geography or poverty alone; it is the result of deliberate political choices. The regime has long deprived peripheral provinces of infrastructure investment, educational funding, and social protection.
While billions are poured into security forces, foreign interventions, and ideological institutions, the children of Saravan study in ruins without basic facilities, and many risk death simply to contribute to their family’s meager income.
The contrast exposes a hierarchy of value in which border communities are treated as expendable, their suffering normalized through decades of discriminatory governance.
Saravan’s schools are more than deteriorating buildings; they are symbols of a national failure. They show the deep divide between official narratives of development and the reality experienced by marginalized citizens.
As these children navigate broken classrooms and life-threatening work, they bear the consequences of a system that has abandoned them.
Their story is a stark reminder that the future of any country is shaped not by slogans, but by its willingness to safeguard the most vulnerable among its people.
