Introduction

Inequality of Opportunity in Elementary Level School Education: Evidence from India

“…First, similar to the extant literature on several Latin American and Sub Saharan African countries, we also find parental education as the most important circumstance ( see for example , Dabalen et al (2015) for Sub-Saharan Africa, Méndez (2020) for Uruguay). Parental education (comprising both father and mother) alone contributes more than 50% of the unfair schooling access of their children even in 2012.…”

“…Interestingly IOP improves for school attendance as the children gets older in many parts of Sub Saharan Africa, which is the opposite case in India (Dabalen et al, 2015). The average probability of Indian children to finish elementary education on time, irrespective of their backgrounds, is higher than some of the Latin American countries (like Brazil, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala).…”

“…In the construction of our outcome variables we keep a buffer of one extra year and accordingly define the ‘timely starting’ as the official enrollment in school at grade-1 level by the age of 6 or at most 7 years, and ‘timely finishing’ as the completion of grade-8 level formal school education by the age of 14 or at most 15 years. In addition we also occasionally explore the rate of school attendance at different age cohorts similar to Dabalen et al (2015), to complement our analysis on starting versus finishing of elementary education on time.…”

“…1.A body of literature, adopting this methodology, has found evidence of IOP among children on several aspects (basic education, sanitation, health immunisation). See for example Molinas Vega et al (2010), Molina et al (2013) for selected Latin American countries and Dabalen et al (2015) for Sub-Saharan Africa. For a broader cross-country level analysis see Abras et al (2013) and Balcázar et al (2015).…”

“…7.Following Dabalen et al (2015) we also have not taken any interaction of circumstances for computational amiability. Since adding interactions is akin to taking more circumstances, the resulting estimates D-index (HOI) will always increase (decrease) unless the additional circumstances are completely orthogonal to the outcome variable.…”