Caste, religion and fragmented societies: education in British India

Latika Chaudhary explores how colonial policies interacted with local conditions to influence the trajectory of Indian education. This is the second of two blogs on public goods provisions in colonial India

Railways and Indian economic development

Earlier this month, Indian Railways celebrated its 160th anniversary. The first passenger train set off on 16 April 1853 from Mumbai to Thane, 34 kilometres away. Here, Latika Chaudhary and Dan Bogart analyse the economic role of railways in British India. This is the first of two blogs on public goods provision in colonial India

Religious Identity and the Provision of Public Goods: Evidence from the Indian Princely States

This paper describes a simple model of how a ruler’s religious identity affects public goods provision. Our primary insight is that rulers reduce public goods expenditures to a greater degree when there are privately-provided substitutes excludable by religion.The basic idea is that if the good is provided privately to the ruler’s co-religionists, the ruler faces weaker incentives to provide this public good because his co-religionists receive lower marginal utility from its provision. Testing such a conjecture is an empirical challenge, however, since the religious identity of rulers rarely varies over time and place. We address this problem by exploiting variation in the religion of rulers in the Indian Princely States. Using data from the 1911 and 1931 Indian censuses, we find that Muslim-ruled states had lower Hindu literacy but had no significant impact on Muslim literacy. This result is consistent with our model, as Muslim religious schools provided a substitute for public schools that served both Hindus and Muslims. The model is further substantiated by the fact that the religion of the ruler had no statistically significant impact on railroad ownership or post office provision, neither of which had privately-provided substitutes

Religious Identity and the Provision of Public Goods: Evidence from the Indian Princely States

Religious identity affects preferences and can consequently affect policy. We propose two mechanisms through which a ruler\u27s religious identity can affect public good provision: i) greater provision of goods in regions where more subjects are the ruler\u27s co-religionists, and ii) lower provision of goods where private markets provide a substitute to the ruler\u27s co-religionists. Empirically, identifying the causal effect of religious identity on policy is often impossible, since the religious identity of rulers rarely changes over time and place. We address this problem by exploiting the variation in the religion of rulers in the Indian Princely States in the early 20th century. The Indian Princely States had signi cant variation in the religion of the ruler (primarily Hindu and Muslim), often due to unique historical experiences. Using data from the 1911 census, we find that Muslim-ruled states had lower Hindu literacy but the religion of the ruler had no statistically significant impact on Muslim literacy, railroad ownership or post office provision. These results support the idea that rulers provide less public goods when religious institutions provide a substitute targeted at their co-religionists, but there is only weak evidence that rulers provide more public goods when more subjects share their religious identity

Reading, Writing, and Religion: Institutions and Human Capital Formation

In this paper, we empirically test the role that religious and political institutions play in the accumulation of human capital. Using a new data set on literacy in colonial India, we find that Muslim literacy is negatively correlated with the proportion of Muslims in the district, although we find no similar result for Hindu literacy. We employ a theoretical model which suggests that districts which experienced a more recent collapse of Muslim political authority had more powerful and better funded religious authorities, who established religious schools which were less effective at promoting literacy on the margin than state schools. We test this hypothesis econometrically, finding that the period of Muslim political collapse has a statistically significant effect on Muslim literacy while controlling for it eliminates the significance of the proportion of Muslims on Muslim literacy. This suggests that the “long hand of history” has played some role in subsequent differences in human capital formation through the persistence of institutions discouraging literacy

Big BRICs, Weak Foundations: The Beginning of Public Elementary Education in Brazil, Russia, India, and China

Our paper provides a comparative perspective on the development of public primary education in four of the largest developing economies circa 1910: Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC). These four countries encompassed more than 50 percent of the world’s population in 1910, but remarkably few of their citizens attended any school by the early 20th century. We present new, comparable data on school inputs and outputs for BRIC drawn from contemporary surveys and government documents. Recent studies emphasize the importance of political decentralization, and relatively broad political voice for the early spread of public primary education in developed economies. We identify the former and the lack of the latter to be important in the context of BRIC, but we also outline how other factors such as factor endowments, colonialism, serfdom, and, especially, the characteristics of the political and economic elite help explain the low achievement levels of these four countries and the incredible amount of heterogeneity within each of them.

Big BRICs, Weak Foundations: The Beginning of Public Elementary Education in Brazil, Russia, India, and China

Our paper provides a comparative perspective on the development of public primary education in four of the largest developing economies circa 1910: Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC). These four countries encompassed more than 50 percent of the worldÂ’s population in 1910, but remarkably few of their citizens attended any school by the early 20th century. We present new, comparable data on school inputs and outputs for BRIC drawn from contemporary surveys and government documents. Recent studies emphasize the importance of political decentralization, and relatively broad political voice for the early spread of public primary education in developed economies. We identify the former and the lack of the latter to be important in the context of BRIC, but we also outline how other factors such as factor endowments, colonialism, serfdom, and, especially, the characteristics of the political and economic elite help explain the low achievement levels of these four countries and the incredible amount of heterogeneity within each of them.Brazil, Russia, India, China, economic history, education, political economy, elites

Tertiary education and prosperity: Catholic missionaries to luminosity in India

This paper estimates the causal impact of tertiary education on luminosity across Indian districts. We address the potential endogeneity of tertiary education using the location of Catholic missionaries in 1911 as an instrument for current tertiary education. We find Catholic missionaries have a large and positive impact on tertiary education. Catholics were not at the forefront of tertiary education in colonial India, but they established many high quality colleges following Indian independence. Controlling for a rich set of geographical and historical characteristics, we find a positive causal effect of tertiary education on development, as measured by light density at night. The findings are robust to different measures of development, and are not driven by alternative channels through which missionaries could impact current income.We acknowledge the financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through ECO2011-29283 project, and the Planning and Policy Research Unit at the Indian Statistical Institute (Delhi