Disruptions to early childhood preschool services during a pandemic: Evidence from India

Abstract

Much less is known about the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the provision of early childhood preschool services relative to research on school closures. We conducted surveys of more than 5000 early childhood service providers and leverage temporal and spatial variation in India’s intensity of lockdowns to quantify disruptions to preschool services under the world’s largest early childhood development program between areas with different strictness of lockdown measures. We document a 23 percentage point reduction in the provision of preschool services in red zone lockdown areas (strictest measures) relative to green zone lockdown areas (least strict measures). We find that pre-COVID measures of high worker locus of control and public service motivation offset the reduction in differential preschool service provision by 27–37%.