No abstract

Muslims occupy the second largest share in India's population after Hindus. Therefore, India's overall economic growth and development are largely dependent on the progress of this community. Muslims, by and large, have remained backward in attaining education so far, and the pace of their educational development is quite slow. The situation is even worse for Muslim women. This gives rise to gender disparity in education and raises concerns over the formulation, implementation and monitoring of government policies and programmes directed towards the betterment of this community. This study aims to empirically evaluate the effect of some socioeconomic and demographic variables; particularly household consumption expenditure as a proxy for household income, on current education attendance levels of Muslims using a sample of individuals aged 5-17 years from the National Sample Survey, 68th round Employment-Unemployment survey, 2011-2012. In addition, this article is also an attempt to examine the effect of these factors on the gender gap in education of Muslims. Results from the empirical analysis show that members of this community are less likely to attend any educational institution if they belong to the lower income status household and are more likely to attend if they belong to the upper income status household. In comparison to Muslim girls, Muslim boys are more likely to attend school if they belong to rich families. In contrast, in poor Muslim families, girls are more likely to attend school than boys. Several other socioeconomic and demographic factors also affect current education participation of Muslim children. Besides other factors, if on the one hand, children's growing age and number of children in the household increase gender gap, then knowledge of Internet operation and presence of a female household head help in reducing gender gap in current attendance level of Muslim children in India.

No abstract

This paper examines the role of retirement savings on the living arrangements of persons aged 60 years and above in India. A major challenge to empirically analyze this relationship is the lack of a comprehensive database that captures the financial savings and health indicators of the elderly population in India in the same framework. Therefore, we use two nationally representative data sets and combine them at the district level for our empirical exercise. We exploit the exogenous variation in the exposure to retirement savings across the districts to analyze how retirement savings impact the living arrangements of elderly persons. Our findings indicate that elderly persons in districts with high retirement savings are more likely to live independently. Elderly people from the lower-income strata with retirement savings are more likely to live independently than those from higher-income groups. Our results demonstrate the importance of retirement savings in improving the welfare of the elderly population and the need for further improving the financial penetration among the elderly in India.JEL Classification: G5, G51,I31,J14

No abstract