The State of School Infrastructure in the Assembly Constituencies of Rural India: Analysis of 11 Census Indicators from Pre-Primary to Higher Education.
In India, assembly constituencies (ACs), represented by elected officials, are the primary geopolitical units for state-level policy development. However, data on social indicators are traditionally reported and analyzed at the district level, and are rarely available for ACs. Here, we combine village-level data from the 2011 Indian Census and AC shapefiles to systematically derive AC-level estimates for the first time. We apply this methodology to describe the distribution of 11 education infrastructures-ranging from pre-primary school to senior secondary school-across rural villages in 3773 ACs. We found high variability in access to higher education infrastructures and low variability in access to lower education variables. For 40.3% (25th percentile) to 79.7% (75th percentile) of villages in an AC, the nearest government senior secondary school was >5 km away, whereas the nearest government primary school was >5 km away in just 0% (25th percentile) to 1.9% (75th percentile) of villages in an AC. The states of Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh, and Bihar showed the greatest within-state variation in access to education infrastructures. We present a novel analysis of access to education infrastructure to inform AC-level policy, and demonstrate how geospatial and Census data can be leveraged to derive AC-level estimates for any population health and development indicators collected in the Census at the village level.
['Swaminathan|Akshay|A|', 'Narayanan|Menaka|M|', 'Blossom|Jeff|J|', 'Venkataramanan|R|R|', 'Saunik|Sujata|S|', 'Kim|Rockli|R|0000-0002-9864-3957', 'Subramanian|S V|SV|0000-0003-2365-4165']
D019352:Censuses D003625:Data Collection D006801:Humans D007194:India D012424:Rural Population D012574:Schools
assembly constituencies India census geopolitical units education infrastructures GIS social determinants of health