Child Poverty and Compulsory Elementary Education in India: Policy Insights from Household Data Analysis

Children ( under 15 years of age) growing up in poor and/or nutritionally deprived
households also live with a number of layers of deprivations that stifle their freedom to
actively participate in and benefit from elementary school education. Lack of health care,
limited access to quality schooling and opportunity cost of participation in education are
some of these layers. Human Development Report 2010, using Oxford University’s newly
developed Multidimensional Poverty Index, adds more dimensions to poverty measures over
and above those of the Indian Planning Commission’s (2009) new measure or absolute
poverty used in this paper. These enrich our understanding but do not directly deal with
children growing up in absolute poverty and non- participation in schooling. This issue can
be meaningfully explored with household as the unit of analysis.
The paper uses household level data for 2004–05 (NSS 61st Round) and 1993–94 (NSS 50th
Round) for India and also major states to analyze these issues. We start with the size of child
population, changing share of states and uneven demographic transition in India (particularly
the movement in Total Fertility Rates across Indian states) during 1961–2001. Changes in the
number of children and the household size in very-poor, poor, non-poor low income and nonpoor
high income households from 1993–94 to 2004–05 are analyzed within the crosssections
and also between the two cross-sections. Participation in education, and nonparticipation
separated as child labor and Nowhere (neither in schools nor in labor force) by
poverty status at the all-India and the state levels are reported and commented upon.
Changes in magnitudes & proportions of children in poverty in India and across states during
1993–94 & 2004–05 are presented and the share of some states in these magnitudes is
highlighted. The determinants of non-attendance in schools (i.e. child being in the labor force
or ‘no-where’) for 5–14 year olds are analyzed using formal econometric models — Probit
with binary variables and also Multinomial Logit Models. The results are robust and confirm
our descriptive analysis. Finally, broad features of The Free and Compulsory Elementary
Education Act, 2009 (Law w.e.f. April, 2010) are reported and linked to the policy
implications of our empirical findings for meaningful implementation of the Elementary
Education Law. Potential usefulness of Unique ID in delivery of child focused services and
monitoring is also highlighted.