2
Segmented Schooling: Inequalities in Primary Education
by
Sonalde Desai, Cecily Darden Adams and Amaresh Dubey
Abstract
Indian society has long been stratified along the axes of caste, ethnicity and religion. A large
number of studies report inequalities in various outcomes along the caste, ethnicity and religion. Not
surprisingly, this inequality is reflected in educational attainment too. However, the precise mechanisms
through which inequality in educational attainments manifests itself remains open to debate with a variety
of hypotheses being advanced such as poverty, child labor, lack of access to schools, teacher
discrimination and lack of parental interest in education.
Unfortunately, there is little empirical research examining these hypotheses. Nor are the processes
through which social disadvantages manifest themselves, clearly articulated. This paper utilizes a newly
collected nationally representative survey data from over 41,550 households to examine social inequality in
children‘s educational outcomes. The focus is on 8 to11 year old children‘s reading and mathematical skills.
As expected, the paper documents substantial differences in reading and arithmetic skills between
children from different caste, ethnic and religious backgrounds in India. However, these differences persist
even after controlling for current school enrollment, grade completion and parental socio-economic status.
This suggests that the differences in educational attainment between people of different social strata are
not simply due to difference in enrollment rates. Even when children from disadvantaged groups attend
school, they fail to learn as much as their peers. These findings have important policy implications. Much
of the current discourse has focused on the importance of constructing schools or encouraging parents to
send their children to school. Very little attention has been directed towards what happens in schools. Our
results suggest that even holding school enrollment and grade attainment constant, children from
disadvantaged backgrounds are likely to attain lower levels of reading and arithmetic skills. Since low
performance at primary levels is likely to result in lower academic performance at subsequent levels,
improving school quality and reducing discrimination may be the next challenge facing Indian educational
policy.
Introduction:
India is a predominantly Hindu nation with substantial religious diversity. According to the 2001
census, Muslims form about 13 percent of the nation with other religious minorities such as Christians,
Sikhs and Jains forming another 3 percent. However, the remaining population is also highly
differentiated. About 8 percent of the population identifies itself as being adivasi (the original inhabitants of
Convention