Teacher Absence in India: a Snapshot

25% of teachers were absent from school, and only about half were teaching, during unannounced visits to a nationally representative sample of government primary schools in India. Absence rates varied from 15% in Maharashtra to 42% in Jharkhand, with higher rates concentrated in the poorer states. We do not find that higher pay is associated with lower absence. Older teachers, more educated teachers, and head teachers are all paid more but are also more frequently absent; contract teachers are paid much less than regular teachers but have similar absence rates; and although relative teacher salaries are higher in poorer states, absence rates are also higher. Teacher absence is more correlated with daily incentives to attend work: teachers are less likely to be absent at schools that have been inspected recently, that have better infrastructure, and that are closer to a paved road. We find little evidence that attempting to strengthen local community ties will reduce absence. Teachers from the local area have similar absence rates as teachers from outside the community. Locally controlled non-formal schools have higher absence rates than schools run by the state government. The existence of a PTA is not correlated with lower absence. Private-school teachers are only slightly less likely to be absent than public-school teachers in general, but are 8 percentage points less likely to be absent than public-school teachers in the same village. (JEL: O15, I21, H41, H52) Acknowledgments: We thank Abhijit Banerjee, Jishnu Das, Jean Dreze, Esther Duflo, Asim Khwaja, Ben Olken, Lant Pritchett, Mark Rosenzweig, and seminar participants at various institutions for their comments. For excellent fieldwork, we thank the staff of the Social and Rural Research Institute (New Delhi), and especially Chhavi Bhargava, Navendu Shekhar, A V Surya, and Aditi Varma. Anjali Oza and Sandra Sequeira provided excellent research assistance. We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the UK Department for International Development. Muralidharan thanks the Rai family in Delhi for their hospitality and the Fellowship in Justice, Welfare, and Economics at Harvard University for financial support. E-mail addresses: Kremer ([email protected]); Muralidharan (muralidh@ fas.harvard.edu); Chaudhury ([email protected]); Hammer (jhammer@ worldbank.org); Rogers ([email protected]) Submitted to Journal of the European Economic Association (9/15/04)