School choice in rural India : perceptions and realities in four states

Indian parents are faced with more choices of schools, but with less information on schools and schooling. The study across four states in rural India suggests that perceptions of teaching–learning, discipline, and safety of children in schools determine school choice among parents. Expenses are a critical consideration for parents who send children to public schools, while the English medium is important for parents of children going to private schools. However, parental choices of low-fee private schools are often not based on accurate information, and parents emphasise many educationally unimportant but aspirational factors. The marketing efforts of schools and cultural aspirations of parents reinforce each other, allowing for a situation in which actual educational outcomes can be subordinated, or worse, undermined

Are educated leaders good for education? evidence from India

Formal education is often viewed as a proxy for the quality of leaders. Recently, candidates with low education levels have been disqualified from contesting local elections in some states in India. But there is no conclusive evidence linking education to the effectiveness of leaders. Against this backdrop, we investigate whether having educated political lead ers in the state legislatures in India improves education outcomes. Using comprehensive data on various outcomes such as learning levels, enrollment, school funding and infras tructure, we find that the effectiveness of educated leaders depends on the initial level of development of the state. Educated leaders yield better education outcomes for their con stituents only in those states where the initial level of development is high. There is no impact of educated leaders in less-developed states or in the overall sample. Our identifi cation strategy is based on an instrumental variable that exploits the quasi-experimental election outcomes of close elections between educated and less-educated politicians. The results are consistent throughout various robustness analyses. These findings have implica tions for recent policy changes mandating minimum education requirements on candidates in two states and similar proposed changes in other states

School choice in rural India: perception versus reality

School choice has increased signicantly in India – with growth of low-fee private schools – and this is considered important within a market-based approach to schooling. Based on a eld study across four states in rural India, this article shows how parents emphasise many educationally unimportant, aspirational factors in their choice, and how their choice of low-fee private schools is often based on inaccurate information

The Budget does not help those facing hunger, unemployment and loss of educational opportunities

his Budget was set in the context of a once-in-a-century pandemic that devastated lives and livelihoods in an already slowing Indian economy. The pandemic and the measures to contain it have created a multidimensional crisis—economic, nutritional and educational—in addition to the original, and still ongoing, health crisis. These crises, if not addressed, can have sustained long-term negative ramifications for generations to come. For instance, the pandemic-led job losses may result in a marked shift in the structure of the Indian economy, pushing it towards higher levels of precarity and even lower earnings. The rise in food insecurity that India is experiencing in the face of this pandemic could increase malnutrition levels among mothers and children for many years to come. The learning losses due to the closure of schools could be permanent for many children. Even before the pandemic, India’s job market was weak and the nutritional status of its citizens and the learning levels of its children were abysmally poor. This Budget was an opportunity to redress these issues

Pandemic, informality, and vulnerability : impact of COVID-19 on livelihoods in India

We analyze findings from a large-scale survey of around 5000 respondents across 12 states of India to study the impact of COVID-19 pandemic containment measures (lockdown) on employment, livelihoods, food security and access to relief measures. We find a massive increase in unemployment, an equally dramatic fall in earnings among informal workers, large increases in food insecurity, depletion of savings and patchy coverage of relief measures. Two-thirds of our respondents lost work. The few informal workers who were still employed during the lockdown experienced more than a fifty percent drop in their earnings. Even among regular wage workers, half received either no salary or reduced salary during the lockdown. Almost eighty percent of surveyed households experienced a reduction in their food intake and a similar percentage of urban households did not have enough money to pay next month's rent. We also use a set of logistic regressions to identify how employment loss and food intake varies with individual and household level characteristics. We find that migrants and urban Muslims are significantly worse off with respect to employment and food security. Among employment categories, self-employed workers were more food secure. The Public Distribution System (PDS) system was seen to have the widest reach among social security measures. However, even under PDS, 16 percent of vulnerable urban households did not have access to government rations. Further, half of the respondents reported not receiving any cash transfers (state or central). We conclude that much more is needed in the way of direct fiscal support that has been announced thus far by state and central governments in India

Childbirth and women’s labour market transitions in India (revised)

The impact of childbirth on women’s employment has been discussed extensively in the context of developed countries. Constraints on mothers’ labour market participation and consequent fall in earnings are characterised as the ‘motherhood penalty’. This phenomenon is relatively less explored in developing countries primarily because of the lack of suitable data. In this paper, we use primary data from India, collected via a life history calendar administered to men and women separately. Using an event study method, we estimate the impact of the first childbirth on women’s labour market participation. Our main finding is that the birth of the first child does not impose a penalty, in the traditional understanding, on a mother’s labour supply. While overall employment does not show any association with childbirth, women’s paid work registers a significant increase two to three years post childbirth. This impact is largely due to an increase in informal paid work and driven by women with lower levels of education and from relatively poorer households. Our results suggest that in a developing country like India, characterised by informal labour markets, and early age of childbirth, the impact of motherhood on employment may need an alternate framing rather than one based on developed countries

Do educated leaders affect economic growth? evidence from India

We study the impact of electing an educated politician to state legislative assemblies on economic growth in the politician’s constituency. Intensity of night lights is used to proxy for constituency-level economic activity and data on all politicians contesting state elections between 2008 and 2013 is used. Our identification strategy is based on a re gression discontinuity design that exploits quasi-experimental election outcomes of close elections between educated and less-educated politicians. We find that having a gradu ate state representative increases the growth rate of night lights by about 2 percentage points in the constituency. Though statistically significant, the impact on economic ac tivity of having an educated leader is substantially lower than that of having a woman or non-criminally accused leader. Further, the effect of educated leaders is heterogeneous depending on the initial level of development of the state. Our findings have implications for recent policy changes mandating minimum education requirements of leaders in some states of India

The global consumption and income project (GCIP): an overview

We introduce two separate datasets (The Global Consumption Dataset (GCD) and The Global Income Dataset (GID)) making possible an unprecedented portrait of consumption and income of persons over time, within and across countries, around the world. The current benchmark version of the dataset presents estimates of monthly real consumption and income for every percentile of the population (a ‘consumption/income profile’) for more than 160 countries and more than half a century (1960-2015). We describe the construction of the datasets and demonstrate possible uses by presenting some sample results concerning the distribution of consumption, poverty and inequality in the world