Assessing the Impact of District Primary Education Program in India

Abstract

We examine the impact of India's District Primary Education Program (DPEP) introduced in the mid-1990s. We exploit the fact that the DPEP was targeted towards primary school age children and was introduced in phases to different districts in India, and many of the districts never got the program to implement a difference-in-difference strategy to find the causal impact of the program on probability of attended primary school, probability of completed primary education and years of schooling. We find that the DPEP program increased the probability of attended primary school and completed primary school by about 2 percentage points. Similarly, the program increased the years of schooling by 0.16 years.

Preference for Boys, Family Size and Educational Attainment in India

“…The impact on years of schooling is small but economically meaningful and comparable with other educational interventions in developing countries. At the mean family size of 3.54 in our sample, this translates to a reduction of 0.28 years of schooling in the average family, which is comparable with findings in other studies of education-specific policy interventions (Azam and Saing 2016;Duflo 2001). 9 Our finding implies that population stabilization policy may be as effective as education policy in improving human capital in developing countries.…”

“…Although our results may be an upper estimate of the impact of family size, we find that having an additional sibling can reduce average years of schooling by close to one-quarter of a year and reduce attendance by 1 to 2 percentage points. These results are modest but compare in magnitude with those of school construction and the provision of additional resources to schools (Azam and Saing 2016;Duflo 2001).…”

“…Table 4 also reports the Kleibergen-Paap rk Wald test to detect whether the instrument suffers from a weak-intrument problem. Both the first-stage F statistic and Kleibergen-Paap rk Wald Statistic are significant, indicating that our analysis does 9 In an evaluation of the District Primary Education Program (DPEP) in India, Azam and Saing (2016) found that increasing resources in school led to an increase of between 0.1 and 0.2 years of schooling. Similarly, Duflo (2001) found that each primary school constructed per 1,000 children under the Sekolah Dasar INPRES program in Indonesia during [1973][1974][1975][1976][1977][1978][1979] led to an average increase of 0.12 to 0.19 years of education in Indonesia.…”

Shedding Light on Regional Growth and Convergence in India

“…Even though we already control for initial electricity access that does not rule out this possibility. In column 4 20 Moreover, the general finding of divergence across states is informed by the patterns documented within this subset. In column (1) of Table 7 we can see that districts within these states were also converging.…”

“…Further, even if one did have a more precise electricity generation measure (eg power consumption) it would be subject to the same deficiencies as other statistics generated by local agencies. 20 Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Gujarat, West Bengal, Orissa, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and Punjab. between states that were initially better off, those in the middle, vs those that were poorest as measured by initial lights per capita. One would obviously expect convergence to be much faster among initially poor states vs rich ones but the difference in magnitude would nevertheless be of interest.…”