Speaker: Professor Abhiroop Mukhopadhyay, Indian Statistical Institute, New Delhi

Date & Hour: 04 November 2020, 4:00 pm

Title:  School Expansion and Caste Composition of Schools in Ethnically Fragmented Societies: Empirical Evidence of India

 Abstract:

 Providing better primary school access to rural children has led to a secular decline in distance traversed by children to go to schools, thereby leading to a rise in enrolments over the years. In this paper, we ask if there are costs to such fragmentation of schooling supply within villages. Our results show that the presence of a large number of schools in a village are associated with lower caste diversity at the school level. Further, this negative association is stronger for villages that are more diverse in their caste composition. While these results are driven by the recent expansion of private schools, they are present even in villages which have only public schools. We also provide suggestive evidence that lower average school diversity is correlated with lower average scholastic performance of children. Our results suggest that while consolidation of primary schools (rationalization) are needed to make schools more caste diverse (a socially desirable goal in itself), there may also be aggregate efficiency gains in human capital from doing so.