Official attitudes are hardening towards the minority group amid an anti-Muslim crackdown, say activists

For Rohingya refugee Hussain Ahmed, the hope that his children might receive a formal education to secure a better adulthood than his own was what “kept him going”. After fleeing to India from Myanmar in 2016, he began working as a construction worker in a country where he is not allowed to seek legal employment. Then he met with a new hurdle.

“For the last few years, I have been running from pillar to post, trying to get a local government-run school to enrol my 10-year-old son and seven-year-old daughter. I cannot afford the fees of privately run schools, so the government ones were my only hope. But all of them turned my children down,” says Ahmed, who lives in the Khajuri Khas area of Delhi with his wife and four children.