Can Greater Access to Education Be Inequitable? New Evidence from India’s Right to Education Act
India moved to a constitutional guarantee of universal basic education with the Right to Education (RTE) Act in 2009 that called for full access of children aged 6-14 to free schooling. This paper considers the offsetting effects from induced expansion of private tutoring that limited gains in educational equity from RTE. We develop a unique database of registrations of new private educational institutions offering tutorial services by local district between 2001-2015. We estimate the causal impact of RTE on private supplemental education by comparing the growth of tutorial institutions in highly competitive educational markets to that in less competitive educational markets. We find a strong impact of RTE on the private tutoring market and show that this holds across alternative definitions of highly competitive districts and a variety of robustness checks, sensitivity analyses, and controls. Finally, we provide descriptive evidence that these private tutoring schools do increase the achievement (and competitiveness) of students able to afford them.
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