India has more uneducated people than anywhere in the world – partly because of a preference for son

[INDIAPOSITIVE]

India has more uneducated people than anywhere in the world – partly because of a preference for sons
Despite education being offered as a fundamental right, more than 40% of India’s children drop out of elementary school.
Shelly Walia and Akshat Rathi, qz.com · Today · 09:20 pm

Photo Credit:Roberto Schmidt/AFP
India is home to the world’s largest population of illiterates. And part of the blame, according to a new study, may lie in the country’s preference for sons over daughters.

Despite education being offered as a fundamental right, more than 40% of India’s children drop out of elementary school – and the country has more than 287 million illiterates, 37% of the global total. Moreover, 40% children are stunted in India, which means they don’t grow to their full potential because they don’t get the necessary resources.

Part of the blame lies in the cultural preference towards the male sex, according to Adriana Kugler of Georgetown University and Santosh Kumar of Sam Houston State University who authored the working paper, published by the American non-profit, National Bureau of Economic Research.

They come to these conclusions by analysing district-level household survey from 2007-08 to examine the impact on educational outcomes and the national family health survey from 2005-06 to examine the impact of family size on weight and height of young children. Both these surveys are among the most comprehensive surveys produced in the country.

One way in which this bias manifests is in families where, when the first born is a girl, parents will continue to have more children until they have a boy. Thus, in a society that prefers sons, the first child’s sex in India becomes an indicator whether or not a second child will be planned, and of the total number of children in the household. This, in turn, decides the size of the family.

This situation does not have much effect on children’s literacy or health in a rich family. There these “extra” children tend to receive at least the minimum amount of resources needed to survive and thrive. In lower caste, rural and poor households, however, the limited resources means that an extra child takes away some resources from all the children in the family.

An extra child in the family reduces schooling, on average, by 0.1 years. Furthermore, that extra child reduces the probability of ever attending or being enrolled in school by up to 2%. Both numbers may seem small, but for the size of India’s young population, the upshot is that millions don’t go to school enough or at all.

However, the impact of an extra child “in terms of reducing enrolment and attendance double and the impact of an extra child on years of schooling increase fourfold for illiterate and poor mothers, suggesting much larger gains from reducing family size in disadvantaged households,” according to the report.

Kugler and Kumar also looked at the effect on the health of children as families became larger. But they got mixed results on the impact it had had. However, Quartz recently reported that another study by Northwestern University’s Seema Jayachandran and Harvard University’s Rohini Pande had clearly shown negative results.
The Indian first and eldest son tends to be taller than an African firstborn. If the eldest child of the family is a girl, and a son is born next, the son will still be taller in India than Africa.

For girls, however, the India-Africa height deficit is large. It is the largest for daughters with no older brothers, probably because repeated attempts to have a son takes a beating on the growth of the girls.
As is the case with any working paper, there is a chance that Kugler and Kumar’s finding may not withstand stronger scrutiny. However, Kugler remains confident. “We have done many robustness checks so the results are unlikely to change,” she told Quartz.

 

[sree45]

India has more number of uneducated because India is the second most populous country in the world. End of story.

 

[Shotgunner51]

Here is the article dated April 13, 2015
India’s preference for sons has created a nation of tiny people – Quartz

India’s Preference For Sons Has Created A Nation Of Tiny People

Indian children are among the shortest in the world, and the country’s preference for sons might be to blame.


Globally, one in four children under the age of five is stunted—that is, they grew at a slower rate than a healthy child would. This stunting is manifest in shorter than average height. About half the stunted children live in Asia and another one-third live in Africa. India has the fifth-highest stunting rate in the world — nearly 40% of the children were stunted in 2005. This is a worrying proportion, even if you didn’t know that by 2020 India is projected to have the world’s youngest population.


Shorter children are not just less healthy, but also perform poorly in cognitive tests and, thus, eventually earn less.


Asian enigma


Economic growth in West has been associated with rapid growth in height. For instance, the Dutch are, on average, nearly 20 cm taller than they were only 200 years ago. But economic growth and height haven’t increased in tandem in Africa and Asia.


India’s economic growth exceeded 6% per year, between 1992 and 2005, yet stunting declined by just 0.6% per year. But while India performs better on most health and economic factors, such as life expectancy, food security and educational attainment, when compared to Sub-Saharan Africa, Indian children are, on average, shorter than African ones.

Previous work has suggested that widespread practice of open defecation in India is partly to be blamed for this height discrepancy. This happens because disease-causing bacteria, released in the open because of this practice, find an easier route into the guts of children. Height is highly heritable, so another reason may be that Indian genes are biased towards shorter heights.​

However, Northwestern University’s Seema Jayachandran and Harvard University’s Rohini Pande thought that it can’t be the full explanation behind the discrepancy. In a working paper published by the American non-profit, National Bureau of Economic Research, Jayachandran and Pande find that stunting in Indian children could also be blamed on the cultural preference for sons.


In India, on average, the first child—if he is a son—doesn’t suffer from stunting. But, if the first—and so the eldest—child of the family is a girl, she suffers from a height deficit. And, then, if the second child is a boy, and hence the eldest son of the family, he will not be stunted. This happens, according to Jayachandran and Pande, because of an “unequal allocation of resources to the first child”.


India has one of the worst gender ratios in the world. The reasons behind preference for a male child are economic, cultural and religious. Males bring in more money into the family (mostly because females are given few opportunities to work).


Boy child is king, girl child is nothing


The height not only varies between sons and daughters, but also tends to differ according to the order of the birth. Basically, the first is the tallest; the second is shorter than the first, but taller than the third, and so on.


The birth order dependency of a child’s height also downplays the effects that genes may have. If genes were causing children to be shorter, then all children within a family would suffer—and not the ones lower in the birth order.


When Jayachandran and Pande compared India and Africa results through this lens, they found that the Indian first and eldest son tends to be taller than an African firstborn. If the eldest child of the family is a girl, and a son is born next, the son will still be taller in India than Africa.


For girls, however, the India-Africa height deficit is large. It is the largest for daughters with no older brothers, probably because repeated attempts to have a son takes a beating on the growth of the girls.


While the study is yet to peer-reviewed—that is, checked by experts in the same field for validity of results—the authors believe “the results are robust.” They are based on data from extensive health and demographic surveys on more than 174,000 children in 25 sub-Saharan countries and India.

 

[ArsalanKhan21]

India and China with skewed gender ratio will soon have Gay culture as many single men will fail to find female brides.

 

[kashif memon]

Is this the reason why their girls perform better than their boys if we talk about academics ? You got something in random site and you posted it here just to make another thread. You really are a ..........................