QUETTA, Pakistan — Balochistan’s government says its drive, launched in March 2024, to curb Sherani teacher absenteeism and other “ghost” staff is tightening across the province as officials try to get closed classrooms running again in remote districts such as Sherani. The campaign relies on terminations, salary cuts and attendance monitoring to push teachers back to school and protect public funds meant for students, Jan. 5, 2026.
Sherani teacher absenteeism: what the crackdown looks like
The crackdown began with orders from Chief Minister Sarfraz Ahmed Bugti, who directed the education department to terminate 2,000 teachers over prolonged absence and move toward biometric attendance systems, Dawn reported.
By October, the government said it had sacked 65 “habitual absentee” schoolteachers and would pursue legal steps to terminate 800 more employees flagged as ghost or chronically absent. An education official quoted Bugti as saying: “Every closed school in Balochistan will be reopened and every child in the province will go to school,” according to Dawn.
Education officials have pointed to early results, but the challenge is whether enforcement reaches the farthest valleys. Saleh Muhammad Nasir, the provincial secretary for secondary education, said 1,000 of about 2,300 inactive schools had been activated and 700 absent teachers dismissed in the previous year, the Associated Press of Pakistan reported. For families confronting Sherani teacher absenteeism, that is the practical test: whether a school that used to be “open” on paper is open in real life — with a teacher inside.
Why Sherani teacher absenteeism is tied to literacy
Sherani’s geography and sparse infrastructure make accountability difficult even when policies look strong on paper. In a 2025 account from the district, The Express Tribune described “silent schools” where students and villagers said teachers routinely failed to show up, and cited Pakistan Bureau of Statistics data placing Sherani’s literacy rate at 23.86%.
Pakistan’s official census portal allows users to compare literacy and out-of-school indicators by administrative unit, including districts and tehsils, according to the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics dashboard. But parents in Sherani say the bigger issue is visibility: whether inspectors visit, whether postings match reality and whether repeat absences trigger action quickly instead of paperwork that drags on for months. Reducing Sherani teacher absenteeism, they argue, is not only a staffing issue — it is a credibility test for public education in one of Balochistan’s lowest-literacy districts.
Old problem, familiar warnings
The province has cycled through similar alarms before. In 2015, the education department launched an inquiry into 600 ghost teachers across Balochistan, Dawn reported. Later that year, Al Jazeera reported that authorities halted funding to hundreds of “ghost schools” and fired absentee teachers as officials tried to shut down institutions that existed only in records.
By 2018, Dawn cited education department documents showing large numbers of non-functional schools and detailed a crackdown that included suspensions, inquiries and salary deductions for chronically absent staff, according to Dawn’s Quetta bureau. Those repeated efforts underline why the latest push is being judged district by district — and why Sherani teacher absenteeism remains a bellwether for whether accountability reaches the province’s periphery.
For now, the government’s message is that payroll fraud and chronic absenteeism will not be tolerated. In Sherani, residents say the measure of success will be simpler: open gates, regular lessons and a sustained decline in Sherani teacher absenteeism that can be felt in classrooms, not just recorded in files.
