Maternal education and the multidimensionality of child health outcomes in India.

Maternal education plays a central role in children's health, but there has been little research comparing the role of maternal education across health outcomes. It is important to distinguish child health outcomes from medical care outcomes. Health outcomes such as short-term morbidity and stunting are multifactorial in origin and determined by a range of factors not necessarily under a mother's control. Mother's education, given the necessary structural factors such as medical centres, is likely to lead to increased access to, and uptake of, medical services. Using data from the 2004-05 India Human Development Survey, eight separate logistic regressions were carried out on 11,026 women of reproductive age and their last-born child under five years of age. The results showed that maternal education had the strongest association with medical care, immunization (except polio) and iron supplementation for pregnant mothers, moderate association with underweight and weak association with short-term diseases and stunting. In addition, the study investigated whether maternal education impacts child health and medical care outcomes through the intervening roles of empowerment and human, social and cultural capital. These intervening linkages were found to be missing for short-term diseases and stunting, bolstering the argument that the influence of maternal education is limited for these outcomes.

The Impact of Transportation Infrastructure on Women's Employment in India.

Indian women's labor force participation is extremely low and they are much less likely than men to work in the non-farm sector. Earlier research explained women's labor supply by individual characteristics, social institutions, and cultural norms, but not enough attention has been paid to the labor market opportunity structure that constrains women's labor market activities. Using data from the India Human Development Survey (IHDS) in 2004-05 and 2011-12, we examine how village transportation infrastructure affects women's and men's agricultural and non-agricultural employment. Results from fixed-effect analysis show that access by paved or unpaved roads and frequent bus services increase the odds of non-agricultural employment among both males and females. The effect of road access on non-farm employment (relative to not-working) is stronger among women than among men. Improved transportation infrastructure has a stronger positive effect on women's non-farm employment in communities with more egalitarian gender norms.

Economic Status and Adult Mortality in India: Is the Relationship Sensitive to Choice of Indicators?

Research on economic status and adult mortality is often stymied by the reciprocity of this relationship and lack of clarity on which aspect of economic status matters. While financial resources increase access to healthcare and nutrition and reduce mortality, sickness also reduces labor force participation, thereby reducing income. Without longitudinal data, it is difficult to study the linkage between economic status and mortality. Using data from a national sample of 132,116 Indian adults aged 15 years and above, this paper examines their likelihood of death between wave 1 of the India Human Development Survey (IHDS), conducted in 2004-2005 and wave 2, conducted in 2011-2012. The results show that mortality between the two waves is strongly linked to the economic status of the household at wave 1 regardless of the choice of indicator for economic status. However, negative relationship between economic status and mortality for individuals already suffering from cardiovascular and metabolic conditions varies between three markers of economic status - income, consumption and ownership of consumer durables - varies, reflecting two-way relationship between short and long term markers of economic status and morbidity.

INDIAN PARADOX: RISING EDUCATION, DECLINING WOMENS' EMPLOYMENT.

BACKGROUND: Theories of human capital would suggest that with more education, women acquire greater skills and their earnings increase, resulting in higher labor force participation. However, it has been long known that in India, women's education has a U-shaped relationship with labor force participation. Part of the decline at moderate levels of education may be due to an income effect whereby women with more education marry into richer families that enable them to withdraw from the labor force. OBJECTIVE: The paper uses the first comprehensive Indian income data to evaluate whether the other family income effect explains the negative relationship between moderate women's education and their labor force participation. METHODS: Using two waves of the India Human Development Survey, a comprehensive measure of labor force participation is regressed on educational levels for currently married women, 25-59. RESULTS: We find a strong other family income effect that explains some but not all of the U-shape education relationship. Further analyses suggest the importance of a lack of suitable employment opportunities for moderately educated women. CONCLUSION: Other factors need to be identified to explain the paradoxical U-shape relationship. We suggest the importance of occupational sex segregation, which excludes moderately educated Indian women from clerical and sales jobs. CONTRIBUTION: This paper provides a more definitive test of the other family income effect and identifies new directions for future research that might explain the paradoxical U-curve relationship.

Escaping and Falling into Poverty in India Today.

The study examines the dynamic nature of movements into and out of poverty over a period when poverty has fallen substantially in India. The analysis identifies people who escaped poverty and those who fell into it over the period 2005 to 2012. The analysis identifies people who escaped poverty and those who fell into it over the period 2005 to 2012. Using panel data from the India Human Development Survey for 2005 and 2012, we find that the risks of marginalized communities such as Dalits and Adivasis of falling into or remaining in poverty were higher than those for more privileged groups. Some, but not all of these higher risks are explained by educational, financial, and social disadvantages of these groups in 2005. Results from a logistic regression show that some factors that help people escape poverty differ from those that push people into it and that the strength of their effects varies.

Getting a Child Through Secondary School and To College in India: The Role of Household Social Capital.

In the classic formulations of social capital theory, families employ their social capital resources to enhance other capitals, in particular their human capital investments. Social capital would seem to be especially important in the case of India where, in recent years, higher education has been under considerable stress with rising educational demand, inadequate supply, and little parental experience to guide their children's transition through the education system. We use the 2005 and 2012 waves of the nationally representative India Human Development Survey (IHDS) to show how relatively high status connections advantage some families' chances of their children reaching educational milestones such as secondary school completion and college entry. The 2005 IHDS survey measure of a household's formal sector contacts in education, government, and health predicts their children's educational achievements by the second wave, seven years later, controlling for households' and children's initial backgrounds.

Enhancing Nutrition Security via India's National Food Security Act: Using an Axe instead of a Scalpel?

In September 2013, India passed a historic National Food Security Act. This paper examines the potential impact of the two central pillars of this act - expansion of the Public Distribution System and strengthening of the Integrated Child Development Schemes - on child nutrition. Using new data from the India Human Development Survey of 2011-12, this paper shows that access to subsidized grains via PDS is not related to improved child nutrition, and while ICDS seems to be related to lower child undernutrition, it has a limited reach in spite of the universalization of the program. The paper suggests that a tiered strategy in dealing with child undernutrition that starts with the identification of undernourished children and districts and follows through with different strategies for dealing with severe, acute malnutrition, followed by a focus on moderate malnutrition, could be more effective than the existing focus on cereal distribution rooted in the NFSA.

Living Arrangements and Health of Older Adults in India.

OBJECTIVES: We investigate the association between the multigenerational household context and health of older adults in India, taking into account potential selection effects. METHODS: Using data from the India Human Development Survey (2004-05), a nationally representative multitopic data set, we employed a two-step analytical strategy--logistic regression followed by propensity score stratification method--to model the effect of contrasting living arrangement types on short-term illness. RESULTS: Overall, older adults living in multigenerational households have the lowest levels of short-term illness. Among them, those who live with their spouse, adult children, and young grandchildren experience the highest health gains. Health advantage diminishes when older adults live only with a spouse and adult children, and further diminishes when they live only with their spouse. Solitary living is associated with the highest likelihood of short-term morbidity. Good health is also shown to be associated with household wealth, gender, household size, and urban residence. DISCUSSION: Our study demonstrates that multigenerational households--the traditional and the most dominant form of living arrangement in India--have protective health benefits for older adults, while taking into account potential selection mechanisms. On Contrary to some epidemiological studies, we do not find any elevated risk of exposure to short-term illness, when older adults are living in households with young grandchildren.

Linkages between maternal education and childhood immunization in India.

While correlations between maternal education and child health have been observed in diverse parts of the world, the causal pathways explaining how maternal education improves child health remain far from clear. Using data from the nationally representative India Human Development Survey of 2004-5, this analysis examines four possible pathways that may mediate the influence of maternal education on childhood immunization: greater human, social, and cultural capitals and more autonomy within the household. Data from 5287 households in India show the familiar positive relationship between maternal education and childhood immunization even after extensive controls for socio-demographic characteristics and village- and neighborhood-fixed effects. Two pathways are important: human capital (health knowledge) is an especially important advantage for mothers with primary education, and cultural capital (communication skills) is important for mothers with some secondary education and beyond.

The end of the gender revolution? Gender role attitudes from 1977 to 2008.

After becoming consistently more egalitarian for more than two decades, gender role attitudes in the General Social Survey have changed little since the mid-1990s. This plateau mirrors other gender trends, suggesting a fundamental alteration in the momentum toward gender equality. While cohort replacement can explain about half of the increasing egalitarianism between 1974 and 1994, the changes since the mid-1990s are not well accounted for by cohort differences. Nor is the post-1994 stagnation explained by structural or broad ideological changes in American society. The recent lack of change in gender attitudes is more likely the consequence of the rise of a new cultural frame, an "egalitarian essentialism" that blends aspects of feminist equality and traditional motherhood roles.