Basic Income: A Transformative Policy for India by Sarath Davala & Renana Jhabvala & Guy Standing & Soumya Kapoor Mehta

Basic Income: A Transformative Policy for India by Sarath Davala & Renana Jhabvala & Guy Standing & Soumya Kapoor Mehta

Author:Sarath Davala & Renana Jhabvala & Guy Standing & Soumya Kapoor Mehta
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: A Transformative Policy for India
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-01-29T00:00:00+00:00


Schooling in rural Madhya Pradesh

India spends 3.1 per cent of its GDP on schooling, which is in the middle range in Asia (UNDP, 2013, p. 162). Across the country, numerous national and state schemes have been designed to promote schooling. Few have had unqualified success.

Madhya Pradesh has traditionally had a poor record in schooling. But successive state governments have tried to tackle the problems through a series of interventions. The Madhya Pradesh government has focused on improving literacy and enrolment in schools for over a decade, most notably through establishing more primary schools under the District Primary Education Programme, the Education Guarantee Scheme for primary education in the tribal areas since 1997, and the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan since the 11th Five Year Plan.

Besides those initiatives, there has also been a CCT scholarship scheme known as Baliki Samriddhi Yojana, which started in 1997. This aims to create an environment that supports the birth of a girl child and her schooling so that she can become an educated and healthy adult. The scheme begins with a post-delivery grant of Rs.500 given to the mother. This is followed by annual scholarships at various stages of the girl’s schooling up to grade 12. The scholarship is available as long as the girl remains unmarried and attends school regularly.

Then there are initiatives such as the Akshaya Patra and the Mid Day Meal Scheme. They are intended to ensure high school attendance and low drop-out rates, by providing an incentive for parents to send their children to school in the form of meals. But the performance of many of these schemes is patchy, due to administrative failure, lack of infrastructure and constant wrangling between bureaucracies that reflects the unclear sharing of responsibility for education, which is both a state and national matter in India. Several studies have shown the extent of these problems (Government of India, 2011).

The Mid Day Meal Scheme has long faced particularly severe mismanagement. The absence of local (‘barefoot’) functionaries for some public services, such as census enumeration, places an enormous burden on teachers because they are expected to help out, thus compromising the quality of primary education, which already is not at a high level.

Irrespective of administrative failure, the existence of these schemes makes it harder to isolate the effects of the basic income, although they do apply in all the villages equally. Our primary hypothesis is that the basic income helps to improve the effectiveness of schooling and could complement the government schemes in several respects.

Before we address the impact of basic income, it may be useful to look at the rubric of Madhya Pradesh’s education system. At the time of the baseline survey, three features of the state’s schooling system stood out. It was clear that government interventions had helped to increase the number of government primary schools; they had come to cover all parts of the state, including rural and tribal areas, thereby addressing the problem of low enrolment at primary school level.

However, the quality of public schooling and



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