Relation between road availability and enrolment to primary school along with other factors – a study of the three districts of West Bengal

Access to school is seen through the available road network. Road availability plays a crucial role for enrolment to primary schools. Enrolment to Primary schools is dependent on available road network along with other factors. Dependency of Road availability can be analysed with enrolment, teacher-pupil ratio and total teachers. For this, Multiple Regression is performed to predict the value of dependent variables based on the value of several independent variables. Further instrumental variables and (2SLS) estimation is done. The outcome variable is number of teachers per thousand students and independent variable is all weather road and enrolment which are the endogenous variable. Instrumental variable taken is teacher pupil ratio and all-weather road.Results indicate that, access to all-weather road is necessary for the number of teachers per thousand students to access primary schools. This helps in improvement of attendance of students as well as teachers. Access to bank is positively related to teacher-pupil ratio but negatively related to enrolment, number of teachers per thousand students. Work-Force participation is positively related to number of teachers per thousand students. As participation of teachers increase, enrolment of students will increase as it is positively related to number of teachers per thousand students. Distance from the District Headquarters is positively related to number of teachers per thousand students. All weather road is positively related to number of teachers to travel to school but availability of road is negatively related to number of teachers per thousand students.