Does Physical Infrastructure of Schools Necessarily Lead to Better Education Outcomes? An Empirical Evidence from Sub-national India

The general government of India (including the centre and states both) spends a substantial amount of money on the development of school infrastructure for education. The article tries to address queries such as whether it is indeed the case that states that could build and provide better infrastructure and input facilities could impact their average education outcomes. It intends to rank the states by their schools’ performances in terms of their physical infrastructure and then find how far the differences in weighted scores of schools can explain the state-level differences in education outcomes captured by Education Index scores by using the Shannon entropy measure and Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) approach. To avoid subjectivity in assigning weights to the infrastructure attributes, the Shannon entropy measure is used. Subsequently, scores of the states/UTs on each of the attributes are computed and aggregated to rank the states, using the TOPSIS approach. This is then compared with the ranks given by the data from the Education Index. The study finds that the physical infrastructure attributes do not critically drive schools’ education performance across states; rather, ‘infrastructure in combination with other qualitative and quantitative interventions’, such as states’ governance and strategic mechanisms, perhaps leads to better education outcomes. The literature on critically examining the role of school infrastructure on education outcomes, considering multiple attributes in the Indian subnational context, is scanty. The findings of this study imply that the funding decisions may be made contingent upon performance, monitoring and incentive-designing mechanisms to enhance the education performance of the states. The results and robustness checks of the model indicate that when the education level is very low, such as in the case of less developed states, one has to focus on factors that would motivate individuals to come to school. In higher quantiles, the quality of education does not depend on infrastructure anymore, and therefore, states in these regions should focus on improving social infrastructure.