Improving application rates into the RTE quotas in private schools: Evidence from Chhattisgarh

the intervention was implemented between April 15 to May 2, 2022 and consisted of the following, sequential, steps:


1) Call all treatment households to offer information and potential support to apply for a quota seat (if eligible). If households could not be reached on the phone number they provided, we revisited the household to elicit this information.
2) Households were asked if they had heard about the RTE quota, whether they knew that the applications were currently open, whether they had thought already of applying to the program, and if they were interested in receiving more information.
3) Interested households were provided detailed information on the eligibility criteria for the policy and the documents required for demonstrating eligibility. Surveyors collected information on each of the documents that the household reported having.
4) If a household reported having all documents, we offered application support and made an appointment to visit the household. If a household did not have all the documents, we provided information on where they could obtain the necessary documentation. Applicants were provided a number that they could call if they succeeded in getting these documents to receive further support.
5) For interested households (which reported having all documents), an interviewer visited them at home to help them fill out the application online. They filled out identifying details, uploaded the documents, showed the households the list of schools available in the portal for their area, and ranked the schools as directed by the parents. If parents wanted, they could submit the forms immediately. If they wanted more time to think about it, the surveyor saved the form and provided the household with the relevant login details so they could submit themselves later.

2022-04-15

2022-05-02

Knowledge of the RTE quota policy
Application to an RTE seat
Assignment to an RTE seat
Enrollment to an RTE seat
Enrollment to private school

Investigating application behavior requires representative data on quota-eligible students, not just those who applied. We collected this in urban and rural areas of Raipur, which is the most populous district of the state. To draw a representative sample, we first selected a random set of 20 locations each in urban and rural areas of the district. We drew a sample of squares on Google Maps of 1km x 1km in rural areas and 300m x 300m in urban areas. After verifying that these included habitations (e.g., excluding exclusively agricultural land), we identified an anganwadi center towards the center of the square, and re-centered the square around it.

In these locations, in February of 2022 we interviewed all households that had a child aged between 3--5 years of age (N=1,059, identified based on a door-to-door listing of 12,225 households). We measure socioeconomic status using an index created from household ownership of assets, consumer durables, and quality of housing using Principal Components Analysis \citep{filmer2001estimating}.


We restrict our attention to households that reported having a mobile phone at the time of the in-person survey in February 2022 (N=914, out of 1,059 households in total) and randomly assigned $\sim$50\% of households in each locality (N=459) to receive an intervention that lowered barriers to application.

randomization done in office by a computer using Stata

Household

No

914 households

914 households

459 treated households