Does Early Childhood Education in India Provide Any Dividend to the Children? An Investigation of the Effect of Children's Kindergarten Attendance on their Performance.

• Applicant: Saikat Ghosh, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Education Systems and Educational Institutions ; Educational Research on Socialization, Welfare and Professionalism
• Term: from 2018 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 417578638

Early childhood is the most crucial period of human life and experienced gained during this time can have a long-lasting effect on children’s development. Therefore, early childhood education (henceforth ECE) is immensely important for providing a strong foundation for children for their future. This has even greater significance for children in the developing world as these children are more vulnerable to risks of not developing to their fullest potential.Therefore, ECE initiatives are of huge relevance for developing countries like India. Although, India has one of the world’s largest publicly sponsored early childhood education and care programme named Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) along with several private initiatives, the effect of such programmes on children’s cognitive and social development is largely unidentified. Looking at the Indian context, the performance of the public ECE programme with regards to reducing malnutrition and undernutrition among children is well documented, albeit cognitive and non-cognitive skills are dubious. Besides, available information suggests that a considerable number of children in India still suffers from different forms of poverty and underdevelopment, and enrolment in preschools is considerably low (UNICEF and World Bank Group 2016). Furthermore, there is an increasing demand for expensive private kindergartens with the perception among parents that private kindergartens are better in developing children’s skills. Therefore, the most obvious questions, which are crucial for children’s development and human capital formation, in the Indian context are: whether existing ECE provisions in India provide any advantage to children in terms of cognitive and non-cognitive development? And whether private kindergartens are more effective compared to the public ones in developing children's cognitive and social skills? Hence, this study proposes to look critically at the intrinsic worth of existing early educational practices in providing a foundation for a better future for the children.The prime objective of the study is to help children and the society by providing policy-relevant empirical evidence which will help developing countries to better care for its children. This unique study, perhaps first of its kind in India, will have a strong policy relevance from various perspectives of child development. For instance, if the publicly sponsored ECE provisions do not provide any dividend to children then immediate policy measures are needed to make it more effective so that children can get the early support they need to develop their fullest potential. Furthermore, it will provide substantial evidence on the relative effectiveness of different ECE provisions viz. public and private kindergartens, which is extremely important to make sure that children get appropriate care and support. Moreover, the study will shed light on the theoretical debate in this regard.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants