A Vaccination for Education: Early Childhood Development Programme and the Education of Older Girls in Rural India

Abstract

Girls lag behind boys in education in India and relatively more provide childcare at home. This paper investigates whether provision of childcare services by India’s largest child development programme narrows the gender education gap by reducing childcare costs. Using logit, village fixed effects and mother fixed effects, I find that girls 6–14 years old, whose younger sibling 0–5 years old is receiving any of the programme services intensely, are at least three percentage points more likely to be in school than similar boys. Further, I find that these girls are also more likely to complete early primary grades than boys.

Acknowledgement

I am highly indebted to Adriana Lleras-Muney and Anil Deolalikar for detailed discussions and comments. I am also thankful to two anonymous referees for very insightful comments. I am grateful to Aman Ullah, Paul Schultz, Jorge Aguero, and participants at the Pacific Conference for Development Economics 2013 and Seventh Annual PopPov Conference on Population, Reproductive Health, and Economic Development, Oslo, for their useful comments. I gratefully acknowledge financial support from IIE/Hewlett Dissertation Fellowship in Population, Reproductive Health and Economic Development and from the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) for the Grad Student Mini-Grant. All errors are my own. I commit to provide relevant data and code files to researchers on request.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. According to ASER (2013), in rural India girls 7–10 years old and 11–14 years old are 0.2 and 0.8 percentage points, respectively, less likely to currently attend school than boys. There is a large inter-state variation: in rural Rajasthan girls 7-10 years old are three percentage points and girls 11-14 years old are six percentage points less likely to attend school than boys in these age-groups. On the other side of the spectrum is West Bengal where girls 7-10 years old are one percentage points and girls 11-14 years old are three percentage points more likely to attend school than boys in these age-groups.

2. 0–5 years old indicates 0–72 months.

3. Six years old indicates children who have completed six years of age.

4. Children under 36 months of age receive ‘take home rations’ that last for a week or a month, depending on the frequency of distribution. Children over 36 months receive feeding at the centre itself.

5. In these states more than 20 per cent of children report receiving supplementary feeding daily.

6. In these states more than 30 per cent report receiving most of their vaccinations at the ICDS centre. For some plausible explanations for inter-state differences in ICDS programme uptake, see Jain (2015). In this paper I discuss this in relation to the poor uptake of the supplementary feeding service, which is the flagship service of the ICDS programme; however, the reasoning holds for other services as well.

7. For rural India as a whole some states were combined into two regions because of small sample size. One region contained Jammu & Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Uttaranchal, Delhi and Goa. Another region contained Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura, Meghalaya and Assam.

8. Using the chi-square statistic, the pooling of girls and boys models is rejected at a 1 per cent level of significance for all specifications.

9. Results are available upon request from author.

10. The girls in this sample, in comparison to the girls in the general sample (Column A), are relatively younger in age, have a mother and father who is less educated, come from a poorer family, are Christian, and have no toilet facility.

11. By comparison, 7 per cent of boys and 19 per cent of girls with a sibling in the age group 24–59 months spend time on childcare.

12. 6 per cent of girls report spending time on this activity.

13. According to the guidelines developed by the World Health Organization, children are considered fully vaccinated when they have received a vaccination against tuberculosis (BCG), three doses of the diphtheria, whooping cough (pertussis), and tetanus (DPT) vaccine; three doses of the poliomyelitis (polio) vaccine; and one dose of the measles vaccine by the age of 12 months. BCG should be given at birth or at first clinical contact, DPT and polio require three vaccinations at approximately 4, 8, and 12 weeks of age, and measles should be given at or soon after reaching 9 months of age.

14. Since children receive vaccinations at health facilities other than the ICDS centre, the results in Table 8 have been separated by children who have received most of the their vaccinations at the ICDS centre from those who have received them at non-ICDS facilities.

15. The question asks if the child attended school at any time during the present and previous academic year.

16. For the immunisation of children, the information on ‘most vaccinations at the ICDS centre’ (the measure of intensity of immunisation used in this paper) is collected in the section under vaccination of children. Therefore, unlike other ICDS services, the reference period for this information is not ‘last 12 months’, but the age of the child.

17. Time use information is collected on three types of days: normal, abnormal, and weekly. Saturday and Sunday are generally reported as ‘weekly variant’, and festival days or when someone is sick are ‘abnormal’ days. All household members are interviewed for at least one normal day.

18. A few children report spending time on this activity.