Indian parents are faced with more choices of schools, but with less information on schools and schooling. The study across four states in rural India suggests that perceptions of teaching–learning, discipline, and safety of children in schools determine school choice among parents. Expenses are a critical consideration for parents who send children to public schools, while the English medium is important for parents of children going to private schools. However, parental choices of low-fee private schools are often not based on accurate information, and parents emphasise many educationally unimportant but aspirational factors. The marketing efforts of schools and cultural aspirations of parents reinforce each other, allowing for a situation in which actual educational outcomes can be subordinated, or worse, undermined.
The arguments and analyses in the Economic Survey 2017 – 2018 leave a lot to be desired, especially in terms of recommending policies that the government can take up in order to reduce gender inequality.
The Aadhaar-linked Direct Benefit Transfer scheme for reducing leakages in Liquified Petroleum Gas (LPG) subsidies has been widely advertised as a phenomenal success and has been used to promote Aadhaar and DBT in other spheres by prominent government officials. However, analyses of various studies and data shows that the government’s tall claims of savings cannot be confirmed and leaves much to be questioned.
There have been insistent calls for collection of sex-disaggregated asset data, particularly with respect to landownership, but the government's data collection efforts leave much to be desired. This article presents national level estimates of men and women's incidence of agricultural landownership for the first time, using the India Human Development Survey, 2011-12. Evidence shows that property in women's name is empowering and can have a transformative effect on their lives and of their families and children.
Using data from the Indian Human Development Survey 2004-05, this article shows that with the change in LPG pricing, neither the benefi ciaries of the current LPG subsidy nor the poorest households are the ones to be affected. The larger agenda must be a multi-pronged policy that promotes improved cooking stoves and cleaner fuels, provides specifi c incentives for poor households to be able to make the switch, and improves LPG distribution networks in order to expand clean fuel use in the country.
In the discussions concerning progress on gender equality, the status of women's asset ownership is a critical missing indicator. Assets are a product of accumulated income, reflecting long-term well-being, and thus are important for determining livelihood choices. While there is general agreement that few women own key assets, there is no systematic sex-disaggregated asset data to measure or monitor. Households are the unit of analysis in standard surveys, where the only feasible gender analysis is by sex of the household head. Using data from a state-representative survey conducted in 2010-11, this paper presents estimates of the gender asset and wealth gaps. The results show substantial gender disparities with respect to asset ownership and wealth.
