Cycling to School: Increasing Secondary School Enrollment for Girls in India

Abstract

various seminar participants for helpful comments and suggestions. Jay Prakash Agarwal, Abhishek K.Choudhary, Elizabeth Kaletski, and Michael Levere provided excellent research assistance. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.© 2013 by Karthik Muralidharan and Nishith Prakash. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source. ABSTRACTWe study the impact of an innovative program in the Indian state of Bihar that aimed to reduce the gender gap in secondary school enrollment by providing girls who continued to secondary school with a bicycle that would improve access to school. Using data from a large representative household survey, we employ a triple difference approach (using boys and the neighboring state of Jharkhand as comparison groups) and find that being in a cohort that was exposed to the Cycle program increased girls' age-appropriate enrollment in secondary school by 30% and also reduced the gender gap in age-appropriate secondary school enrollment by 40%. Parametric and non-parametric decompositions of the triple-difference estimate as a function of distance to the nearest secondary school show that the increases in enrollment mostly took place in villages where the nearest secondary school was further away, suggesting that the mechanism for program impact was the reduction in the time and safety cost of school attendance made possible by the bicycle. We find that the Cycle program was much more cost effective at increasing girls' enrolment than comparable conditional cash transfer programs in South Asia, suggesting that the coordinated provision of bicycles to girls may have generated externalities beyond the cash value of the program, including improved safety from girls cycling to school in groups, and changes in patriarchal social norms that proscribed female mobility outside the village, which inhibited female secondary school participation.

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“…For example, Reis (2013) studies the impacts of CCTs on girls' school enrolment in Pakistan and finds that although CCTs have positive effects, they are not the most cost effective, compared with school building programmes. Muralidharan and Prakash (2014) study the impact of a programme in India which provides girls with a bicycle to help them improve access to school. They find that the enrolment in secondary school has increased and the gender gap has decreased.…”

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“…The influence of distance to school or training center is echoed by other studies as well. For example, Muralidharan and Prakash (2016) report that distance to school is a major factor in secondary school enrollment in Bihar, but the provision of bicycles helps mitigate transportation costs. Similarly, Burde and Linden (2013) investigate the role of placing a primary school in a village, and find dramatic increases in school enrollment and attendance, especially for girls.…”

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“…Things are changing, slowly. The practice of giving boys a bicycle if they go to school but not girls is now overridden by a recently-introduced government policy that provides girls with a bike when they, too, go to school (Muralidharan and Prakash 2013).…”