Factors Affecting Gender Disparity in Muslim Education in India

Reshmi Sengupta and Debasis Rooj ()

Journal of Development Policy and Practice, 2018, vol. 3, issue 1, 87-113

Abstract: Abstract Muslims occupy the second largest share in India’s population after Hindus. Therefore, India’s overall economic growth and development are largely dependent on the progress of this community. Muslims, by and large, have remained backward in attaining education so far, and the pace of their educational development is quite slow. The situation is even worse for Muslim women. This gives rise to gender disparity in education and raises concerns over the formulation, implementation and monitoring of government policies and programmes directed towards the betterment of this community. This study aims to empirically evaluate the effect of some socio-economic and demographic variables; particularly household consumption expenditure as a proxy for household income, on current education attendance levels of Muslims using a sample of individuals aged 5–17 years from the National Sample Survey, 68th round Employment–Unemployment survey, 2011–2012. In addition, this article is also an attempt to examine the effect of these factors on the gender gap in education of Muslims. Results from the empirical analysis show that members of this community are less likely to attend any educational institution if they belong to the lower income status household and are more likely to attend if they belong to the upper income status household. In comparison to Muslim girls, Muslim boys are more likely to attend school if they belong to rich families. In contrast, in poor Muslim families, girls are more likely to attend school than boys. Several other socio-economic and demographic factors also affect current education participation of Muslim children. Besides other factors, if on the one hand, children’s growing age and number of children in the household increase gender gap, then knowledge of Internet operation and presence of a female household head help in reducing gender gap in current attendance level of Muslim children in India.

Keywords: Education; gender disparity; Indian Muslims; logistic regression (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2455133317737936 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:jodepp:v:3:y:2018:i:1:p:87-113

DOI: 10.1177/2455133317737936

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Development Policy and Practice
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().