Educational Expansion and Schooling Inequality: Testing Educational Kuznets Curve for India

The paper aims to analyses the relationship between educational expansion and schooling inequality in India across states and over the age cohort. The focus of the paper is to verify the inverted-U shaped relationship between the mean and dispersion of schooling. The evidence of an inverted-U shaped relationship between the mean and dispersion of schooling is found when dispersion is measured in terms of standard deviation which indicates that as the average level of schooling increases, educational inequality first increases, and, after reaching a peak, starts declining in latter phases of educational expansion. The turning point occurs when average year of schooling is about 7 years. The same inverted-U shaped relation is not observed when inequality in schooling is measured in terms of Gini-coefficient.