School Choice and Implementation: Survey Evidence Across Indian States

Abstract

Research on implementation of basic services points out that the upwardly mobile seem to be exiting the public system for private alternatives, straining the capacity of the public system to serve the poor. But is this national narrative representative of implementation across the various states in India? Based on questions of school choice from a national survey, we argue that respondents’ choice of public or private service seems to be affected by state-level patterns that are obscured by both individual background characteristics from below and the national narrative from above. We argue that background characteristics do explain current school choices but do not fully explain ideal school choices. If ideal school choices are considered akin to the demand side of implementation, then our study shows that both societal and state-level patterns matter as we identified certain underserved populations that still aspire for public services, and who typically get obscured by national-level explanations.