School meals and child outcomes in India

1. School meals and child outcomes in India Farzana Afridi, Delhi School of Economics IGC-ISI Conference, 20th – 21st December, 2010

2. Introduction Quantity of schooling • Enrollment • Grade completion, repetition and drop-outs • Years of schooling Quality of schooling • Teacher quality • Pedagogy • School infrastructure • Information

3. Education and Health Indicators in India • Low levels of education accompany poor health indicators

4. India in comparison with other developing nations • Lags behind in education and health outcomes compared to countries with similar economic growth rates

5. Literature • Programs that subsidize the cost of schooling are popular policy initiatives for increasing school participation in developing countries. • Conditional cash transfers (Progresa in Mexico) • Free textbooks and uniforms (Kenya, India) • Scholarships (India) • Free food grains (Bangladesh) • Evidence of positive effect of school transfer programs on enrolment (Schultz, 2004) • Difficult to measure the effect on daily school participation or attendance – less noisy measure of participation. • Transfers in these programs either did not systematically vary with daily attendance (viz. free uniforms and textbooks) or because attendance was already high prior to program implementation (Progresa)

6. School Meals in India • Unique in-kind transfer that targets both education and health outcomes • The National Program for Nutritional Support to Primary Education or Mid-Day Meal Scheme (MDM) launched in 1995 mandates the provision of cooked meals to all students in government primary schools on school days • Paucity of large-scale survey data on daily school participation and nutritional intakes of targeted population • Case studies: • Urban : municipal primary schools of Delhi • Rural : public primary schools in rural MP

7. Literature on school meals • Ahmed (2004, Bangladesh); Vermeersch and Kremer (2005, Kenya) • In the Indian context, Afridi (2010) finds a 12 percentage point increase in attendance rates of girls in Grade 1 in rural MP; insignificant effect on boys, higher grades and enrollments • Afridi (2010) shows a robust increase in calorie, protein and iron intakes of program beneficiaries in rural MP • Afridi, Barooah and Somanathan (working paper) account for unobserved individual heterogeneity that could simultaneously impact program and school participation to find an overall increase in attendance rates by 5 percentage points in municipal schools in Delhi; no impact on enrollments.

8. Program background • Cooked meal scheme started in municipal primary schools (Grades 1 to 5) of Delhi in July 2003. • Prior to 2002-03, ready-to-eat food was served. • Phased implementation of cooked meal scheme • Phase 1: 410 of 1862 schools got cooked meal between July and August 2003 • Phase 2: Remaining schools got cooked meals between September and November 2003 • In Phase 1, local NGOs/ service providers were selected on the basis of availability of infrastructure and distance from schools. • Schools close to the kitchens transitioned to cooked meals in Phase 1.

9. Program background • Providers re-imbursed at the rate of Rs 2 per child by Municipal Corporation of Delhi. • Food-grains free from Food Corporation of India. • Average cost of food-grains approximately Re 1 per child. • Cost to MCD same as per child cost when ready-to-eat items were distributed.

10. Data • Randomly sampled 26 primary schools in one municipal zone (Central) of Delhi. • Between January 2007 and December 2008 two types of current and retrospective data was collected. • School level data on facilities and implementation of the program at schools (26 in Central zone) • Child-level data of monthly attendance and family characteristics (22 of 26 schools ) • Merged students’ attendance data to their background data using unique enrolment numbers. • Restrict sample to 2002-03 and 2003-04. Total of 3262 students

11. Data-Summary Statistics Table 1: Number of sampled schools in Phase I and II

12. Table 2: School characteristics in April 2003

13. Table 3: Individual characteristics of students enrolled in April 2003: Standard errors in parentheses * significant at 5% ** significant at 1%

14. Methodology • Uses the staggered implementation of cooked meals. • Almost 50% of the sampled schools implemented MDM program before September 2003 and the other half, after September 2003. • Treatment group : 10 schools which implemented MDM before September 2003 (in July or August) . • Control group: 12 schools which implemented it after September 2003 (in October or November).

15. Estimation strategy • School-fixed effects: (1) Pijt = α + β0Tjt + β1t + β2 (Tjt* t) + γ Xijt+ μj + εijt • Pijt : Participation outcome for individual i in school j at time t • Tjt: 1 if school j transitioned to cooked meals before September 2003, 0 if after September 2003 • t : 1 if observation is recorded for September 2003, 0 if September 2002 • Xijt: vector of individual characteristics • μj : unobservable, time-invariant school characteristics • β2 : Coefficient of interest • Individual-fixed effects: (2) Pijt = α + β0Tjt + β1t + β2 (Tjt* t) + δi + εijt - δi : unobservable, time-invariant individual characteristics

16. Table 5: Effect of school meals on attendance rate, 2002-03 (Balanced School Panel) Standard errors in parentheses * significant at 5% ** significant at 1% With controls for grade, social group and father’s occupation

17. Table 6:Effect of school meals on attendance rate, 2002-03 (Balanced Individual Panel) Standard errors in parentheses * significant at 5% ** significant at 1% With controls for age, grade, social group and father’s occupation

18. Table 8: Effect of school meals on attendance rate, Apr-Sep 2003 (Balanced Individual Panel): Standard errors in parentheses * significant at 5% ** significant at 1%

19. Table 9: Effect of school meals on enrollment, Apr- Sep 2003 Standard errors in parentheses * significant at 5% ** significant at 1% With controls for grade, social group and father’s occupation

20. Policy • The evidence suggests a rise in quantity of inputs in the household production function of education and health outcomes: • On-site school meals can be effective in improving the daily participation rates of marginalized students • Results for rural and urban India are qualitatively similar • Studies suggest significant improvements in nutritional intakes as well (Afridi, 2010) • May not improve primary school completion rates • BUT paucity of rigorous evidence on the outputs or direct measures of educational attainment (test scores, primary school completion rates) and health outcomes (anthropometric measures). • Is there a tradeoff between quantity and quality of inputs in the production of education?: centralized vs. decentralized models of meal provision • Cost-benefit analysis: food grains vs. ready-to-eat vs. cooked meals

21. Future research Impact of in-kind school transfer programs on: • Learning (viz., concentration in class, test scores) and long-term health indicators • Quality of teaching Effect of information provision and monitoring on quality of program and schooling

22. Individual Level Characteristics by Gender