Understanding School Attendance: The Missing Link in “Schooling for All” (with Manjistha Banerji) International Journal of Educational Development, 87.
[Best paper awarded by Population Council (Project UDAYA)]
India is close to its goal of achieving 100 % school enrolment for children in the age group of 5–16 years. However, this does not correspond with universal school attendance. Not all children who are enrolled attend school regularly. Enrolment is, at best only “nominal” for them. In this study, we examine the ‘demand’ and ‘supply’ side factors behind low attendance by drawing upon a new dataset on adolescents in India- Understanding Adults and Young Adolescents (UDAYA) for Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Results indicate that girls and older students are more likely to be absent from school. Married girls were more likely to be absent than their unmarried peers. Engaging in unpaid work also deter children from attending school regularly, although surprisingly, there is no significant difference between children who are not working and children engaged in paid work in terms of absenteeism. Religion, affluence, and school type also have a significant influence on attendance. Surprisingly, absenteeism did not emerge to be significant when proficiency in math as a marker of academic performance is taken into consideration. Provisioning of infrastructure can be a particularly effective means towards increasing attendance, as can be the contribution of teachers when considered as positive role models.
Why Do Women Support Wife-Beating More Than Men in India? Evidence From the National Family Health Survey (2015–2016) (with S.R. Chowdhury) The Family Journal.
The motivation of this article comes from the observation that in India, more women than men justify violence. This study seeks to analyze this issue through an interplay of familial relationships along with micro-level factors in explaining attitudes. Also, this article aims to associate women’s perception of subjugation level with her lower sense of entitlement toward medical care and child vaccination. We use the National Family Health Survey 2015–2016 data of India of 47,514 married couples to analyze the above issues. Logistic odds ratios predict the factors of violence justification, and a bivariate probit model is used to analyze the joint probability of seeking antenatal care (ANC) and complete child vaccination. We find that (a) there is a significant variation within couples in their responses to the justification variables; even when both spouses disapproved of violence, around 18% of women reported facing the same. This number is 40% when both justified, (b) the higher the number of marital controls women face, the odds of justifying violence increases by three times, (c) also, the joint probability of utilizing both full ANC and Vaccination decreases by 11 percentage points with women living in the most restrictive marital environment. When international conventions and countrywide efforts are geared toward eliminating domestic violence, it is surprising that women themselves justify getting beaten by their husbands over domestic issues. Therefore, policies need to break the vicious chain of normalizing social norms that promote violence.