Economic Inequality induced Pre-natal Poverty and Learning Outcomes in Rural India: An Empirical Speculation

Abstract

Learning outcomes evaluation has been far and few in between in India. Other than the Annual Status of Education (ASER) reports there is hardly any credible nationwide survey reporting learning outcomes. ASER reports are more than a decade old now, so we have a way of looking at the trends nationwide and across states concerningthe learning outcomes of school children in rural areas. One of the most disturbing features that come across over the last decade of reports is the fact that learning outcomes have been very low across the country, barring a few states, and this low attainment is also progressively dwindling year after year. The conventional explanations abound but we have taken an unconventional route of explaining it through the mechanism of pre-natal poverty affliction mediated by adverse nutrition shocks during the gestation period of these poorly learning school children. To do that we have traced back the per capita food grain availability to the relevant years of gestation period of these poorly learning school children.  Interestingly, we found that poverty in the ‘nutrition space’ during the pre-natal stage could indeed be the dominant explanation for both the low and dwindling learning outcomes of school children in rural India.