 First of all, thank you so much for joining today. So this paper, which is a joint work with my co-authors, Saurabh Paul. So in this paper, we are trying to understand whether a dominant social group in a neighborhood can influence the learning outcome of the marginalized children or not. So let me start by giving you a brief background of the Indian education system. So what has happened in the last few decades, India has undertaken a significant reforms in its education system with the introduction for service Iksha Abhiyan, which means education for all in 2009, 2001, and this was later reinforced with Right to Education Act in 2009. One of the important objective of these reforms has been to universalize the education and also to bridge the social and gender gaps, particularly at the elementary school level. Now, as a result of these reforms, what has happened in the last few years, in the last decades, India has achieved almost a universal enrollment rate, particularly in primary schools. So more than 96 percent children are in the age group of 60-14 years are now in school. Now, as more and more children are now in school, what becomes interesting to understand is whether they are learning anything in school or not. Unfortunately, learning assessment at both national and international level shows a very grim picture. So large number of students in India who are enrolled in school, but they are not equipped with the basic reading and writing skills. So for example, this is in 2018, annual state test of education report, find that only half of the children who are enrolled in grade five can actually read the text which is meant for the grade two. So the student reached the grade five, but they still can't read. So 50 percent of them still can't read the text which is meant for the grade two. Similarly, only one-third of can do a very basic skill which is the division. So they are in grade five, but one-third of them can only do division. So two-third of them can still can't do the division. So this is from the India. Even at the international level, India took part in program for international student assessment where India ranked 72 out of 73 countries in 2009. So clearly children are going to school, but when it comes to learning, there is an inadequate learning. So this in itself is a big challenge that low learning level, but what I'm going to talk about is not only these learning outcomes are low, but there is a huge intergroup disparities in these learning outcome. The group that I'm talking about is a social group. So some of you might be aware that, so in India, based on, so India has the caste system, the traditional caste system where some people are by the birth they are placed. So there is a social hierarchical system where some groups, some part of the population are placed at the top of this hierarchy. Some are at the bottom by birth and some are the outcasted, like they are not the part of these hierarchies. And the two groups which are not the part of this entire hierarchy, they are considered as the two most disadvantaged socioeconomic groups in India. And these groups have been subjected to centuries of exclusion and discrimination. And in our constitution, so they have been referred to as schedule caste, the SCs and the STs. So they are the two most marginalized group in India. Then they constitute roughly 25% of the India's population. Now in efforts to uplift these two marginalized group, government of India has provided them with several affirmative actions so that they can come up with the rest of the population. However, despite these efforts, these groups still remain over-represented among the illiterates, low level of occupation, consumption, and wages. And coming back to the learning level, so what I'm trying to show you in this graph, so we have five learning skills. So there are students who cannot read at all. So these are for the children who are in the age group of eight to 11 years, and so they cannot read at all. So the blue depicts that proportion of students who cannot read at all, and the highest score is the kids who can read a complete story. And we have three groups, the SC, the STs, the two marginalized group, and the rest of the population which is non-SCST. So what we see here is that the larger proportion of students from the non-SCST background can read a story, which means they are on the higher learning skills, whereas the SC and STs are over-represented at the lower level of learning. So 20 percent of the students from the schedule cast, they cannot read at all. They are in the age group of eight to 11 years, still they can't read at all. Similarly, the proportion is 19 percent from the student who's belonging to the ST. So this is for the reading skills. If you look at the arithmetic skills, once again we find that the SC and STs are over-represented at the lower levels of learning. So the proportion of students who cannot recognize numbers are higher from SC and ST background compared to the non-SCST. Now, why do we think that it's a problem, that some groups are doing good, some groups are, why do we need to address this? Well, if you want to achieve the goal of inclusive education, we have to pay attention that nobody should lag behind. Not only that, the education, we all know that education is associated with the social and economic mobility. The deficit that you see at a very early on, at the school age, they just magnifies over time. So if we don't pay attention at the right time, and pay attention at the latest stage, it just widen up. So we have to pay attention to these inequalities that we see at the right age, when the children started going to school. Now, what the literature suggests? So if you look at the literature, literature has mostly directed attention to two sorts of factors. So why the children from the schedule cast and schedule drives perform a lagging behind compared to the non-SCST is, so one could be the individual or the household factors. So most of them are coming from the parents are the first generation learners, so they don't get any help. The parents are poor, they cannot send them to the, let's say, private usians, or they cannot send to the good schools, or they're not getting any help from the school. So one set of factors, one set of literature has directed attention to these kind of individual and the household-related factors. The others are the school factors, like the type of the school that they are going to, the public versus private, or the teacher's discriminatory behavior towards these groups in the school, can explain that why they are lagging behind compared to the other population. So why we believe that certainly these are the important factors to understand these gap, but still we feel that these gives a very limited explanation. In this paper, we are trying to argue that it's the village social structure that also plays a very important role in understanding the low learning levels of these two marginalized groups. So by the village social structure, I mean, so assume that we have a neighborhood. Now, which group is a dominant in our neighborhood, can that determine the learning outcomes of these marginalized kids? With this, we are making the contribution to the literature that we are trying to look at this new factor which is a village social structure, and also we are trying to move away to this emerging literature which is, so usually the social identity is associated with the individual or the household. But in this paper, we are trying to look when the identity is associated with a larger geographical unique like a village and its impact on the economic outcome which in our case is a learning outcome. Now, how do we think the village dominance plays any important, can influence the learning outcome? So neighborhood and community plays a very important role in the social and economic mobility for the later life. So there is a literature in USA and Europe which suggests that neighborhood that the child lives in when they were young plays a very important role in their later life outcomes. So think of a situation. There is a kid from a marginalized caste. So in the first case, assume that he's staying in a village which is dominated by the higher caste, the other caste group. So in such setting, the caste of the marginalized kid is very salient, right, because they are in minority and the higher caste is a dominant group. So they may experience a higher stress, differential treatment in such setting, which lower their confidence, and thereby they perform lower, then their learning outcome is low. Now, in the other situation, the higher caste, so there is a literature which suggests that the higher caste dominated, the non-SCST dominated villages are also the privileged villages in terms of getting the good quality of public school. So when the marginalized kid is staying in these villages, it also means that they have access to the good quality public schools, which can influence their learning outcome positively, right? So in the first case, it could affect their learning outcome negatively. In the second case, it could affect their outcome negatively. Now, which of these effects is dominant? It's something that we try to empirically seek in this paper. Okay. So how do we define the village dominance? So this concept of village dominance is not new. In fact, it is borrowed from anthropology and sociology literature, where the village dominance is defined as a group based on the economic power. So the group holding the maximum economic power in a village or in a neighborhood is said to be the dominant social group. Now, recently this dominant caste or is in the empirical literature, how is it defined as based only on the economic power? So based on the land ownership. So let me tell you what define we use. So we use a caste dominance, so basically this which group is dominant based on the economic power, which is arising from the land ownership. So for example, if the SC owns the majority of the total village land. So in the village, let's say there is a 100 percent land. Now, 80 percent of the land is owned by the SC. We say that the SC is a dominant group. So whichever groups owns the majority of the land in total village, they have the maximum economic power, and that group is said to be the dominant group. We use a recent round of Indian Human Development Survey, which was in 2011 and it's a nationally represented survey of 42,000 households in 1500 villages. A separate schedule for reading, writing, and arithmetic skills is also canvas in this schedule, which help us to determine the learning outcome of these kids. So our main assumption here is that this village dominance variable, which is our main variable of interest, is exogenous. Now, why do we think is exogenous? Historically, it was only the people of the upper caste or the higher caste who owns the most of the economic resources, and they were the dominant caste. In 1950s, what happened is that they were the landlords and the people from the lower caste were working on their land. In 1950s, there was something called Abolition of Jamidari system, where the land was given from these higher caste landlords to the people who are working, which is mostly from the lower caste. So the economic power redistributed from the higher caste also to the lower caste, and that's how even the lower caste also became dominant in some of the villages, and that's the variation that we try to exploit in this paper. After 1950s, there is nothing major in terms of the land reform system that could redistribute this land. So village caste composition and land settlement patterns have remained essentially unchanged after 1950s. So if you look at these two years, 2005 and 2011, we see that the village which are dominated by different group is fairly constant. So the proportion of village which are dominated by SESD and non-SESD is fairly constant. So the assumption that the SESD is exogenous is proved there. The other concern that it could be that people will migrate to the villages with a better economic outcome, it's also less likely in our sample, because more than 95 percent of the sample in our village has been staying for more than 50 years in their village of residents. If you also look at the change in the land ownership between 2005 and 2011, again, it's close to zero. So there is no significant change in land. Also the sale and purchase of land in rural India is quite low. So coming back to the main, now I'll just talk about my results. So what are we trying to do? We are trying to test this very simple hypothesis, so you and me, we both are from the marginalized caste. You are staying in a village which is dominated by your same caste group. I'm staying in a village which is dominated by the higher caste group. All other things are same. We have same socioeconomic status, we are going to same type of school. Do we see any difference in our learning outcome just because our neighborhoods are different? That is what we are going to test now. Okay. So the first thing is the identity, these are the kids. So SC is the social identity of a kid, and this is the identity of a village. So what we are trying, we have two learning outcomes. The one is cannot read at all, and the other is can read a story. The lowest and the highest outcome. So what we see here is that if you look at how the SC kid in the non-SC-ST village is performing, the SC kid in the SC dominated village is performing, and the SC kid in SC dominated village is performing. This is what we are going to see. Okay. So if you look at the proportion of the kids who cannot read at all, so the proportion of SC kids who cannot read at all is higher in a non-SC-ST dominated villages. So when the neighborhood of the SC kid is dominated by the higher caste group, they are more likely that they cannot read at all. If you look at those who can read the story, which is like getting the highest score on learning, we find that the SCs, the higher proportion of the SCs in their own caste dominates. So 37 percent of the SCs can read a story when they stay in the village which is dominated by their same caste compared to the higher caste group. This is for the reading skills, and this is also true for the arithmetic. Once again, we see that the proportion of the students who cannot recognize number, the SC kids are lower when they stay in their own caste dominated villages compared to the non-SC-ST dominated villages. They do similar in division. So for SC, the clear pattern is that they are doing better in their own caste dominated villages compared to the higher caste dominated villages. For STs, we do not find a very clear pattern. One of the reason could be that, so more than 70 percent of the SCs, they are basically the tribal population, they stay in the village which are dominated by their caste, their same caste. So their integration into the other caste is still very low. So we are not able to exploit that variation in the dominant caste, and that could be one reason that for SCs, we do not see a very clear pattern. So these are the main findings of the paper, that for the schedule caste students, we find that they are doing better in their own caste dominated villages in both reading and arithmetic skills. Next, we just try to see whether these results are robust or not. So while we believe that our village dominance variable is exogenous, there could be several other confounding factors which may influence our outcome. So what we do is that we run a very simple ordered-property model because our outcome variable is in the ordered model, is the ordered variable, and we just run this model and see that once we control for the parents' education, socioeconomic status, the type of the school that the children are going to, whether our results hold true or not. We find that our results does hold true. For SCs, we find that the own village advantage remains significant even when we control for the bunch of important variables. For SCs, we do not find any significant results. This is true for both reading and arithmetic skills. Okay. So this was the first part of the paper where we show that the SCs are doing better in their own group. Now, the question is, why do we think that the SCs are doing better in their own caste-dominated villages compared to the non-SCs-dominated villages? Here we try to highlight the role of the teacher's behavior. So we try to check whether the teacher's behavior towards the SC children differ in different types of villages. So we all know that teachers are believed to the fundamental agents who influence the learning process in schools. Now, in India, the practice of verbal abuse and the corporal punishment is legally probated. So teachers are not supposed to do it. It's legally probated. But still, in 2011, more than 40 percent of the parents reported that their kid has been beaten up in the last 30 days, or has been scolded up by the teachers in the last 30 days. So despite the legal probation, the one of the most common way to ensure discipline in school is the corporal and the verbal abuse. So what we do is that we try to measure the teacher's behavior through these three indicators. So whether the child has been beaten up in the last 30 days, whether the child has been scolded in last 30 days, and whether the child felt that the class teacher has treated him or her unfairly. This is the teacher's behavior towards the SC kid in the non-SCs-dominated villages and SC-dominated villages. So remember that SCs were doing better in their own caste-dominated villages. So what we're trying to show here is that the student are more likely to be beaten up. The SC children are more likely to be beaten up, scolded, and treated unfairly when they stay in the village which are dominated by the higher caste, compared to their own caste-dominated villages. So this could be one channel that teaches behavior towards the SC children vary across different villages, which may explain that why they are performing higher in their own caste-dominated villages compared to their own caste-dominated villages. Okay. Now why do we think the teachers misbehaved with SC children in the higher caste-dominated villages? Now one could be there is now this literature which shows that teachers sharing the same characteristics with the students are able to understand the student needs better, because they can understand the struggle that they are going to. Now in the non-SCS-dominated villages, the proportion of the teachers which are coming from the higher caste is higher. So there is a higher social distance between the SCs and the non-SCS-dom, because the teacher's caste is different, the student caste is different, and they may not be able to understand the vulnerability of the student, the marginalization of student that they're coming. The other thing could be that the teachers exert more influence and power in the non-SCS-dominated villages. So the teachers know that the SC is a minority caste in this village. So they know that even if I misbehave with them, they don't have power or voice, and nothing will rebound on them. Nobody will complain about me, because they are the minority caste. But whereas in the SC-dominated villages, the teachers know that this village has been dominated by the SCs. So they have the whole the power. So if I misbehave with them, it will rebound on me. People will get collect, where the people will file a complaint against me or people will take action against me, because they are the dominant caste, they have that power. So these are the reason that we think that why the teachers misbehave with SC children in the villages, which are dominated by the non-SCSGs. We also try to explore the several other possible. So while the teachers behave as a one channel, we also try to look for the other alternative channel. So think of a situation, it could be possible that it's not the teacher's behavior, but let's say the quality of the school in the SC-dominated villages is better. Or let's say that it's the overall discrimination in the SC-dominated villages is low compared to the non-SCSG-dominated villages. So that improves the confidence of the children and that's why they perform better. And so it's not the teacher's behavior, but the overall discrimination in the village from the people, from the neighborhood, that could explain. We do not, it could be that the parents of the children, aspiration in the different villages could be different. So the SC parents may have a higher aspiration in their own dominated villages, which could influence their learning positively compared to the non-SCSG-dominated. But we do not find any of these alternative channels to hold true, which kind of make our, the channel of teachers behavior even more important. So these are the main findings of the paper. We find significant intercast differences in both reading and writing, in both reading and arithmetic skill. We find that the SC children they score higher when they stay in the village, which are dominated by their same caste group. And one of the important channel that we find is the probability of beaten up, scolded and treated unfairly is lower when the SC children stay in their own caste-dominated villages compared to the higher caste-dominated villages. We also did certain robustness check. So we use alternative definitions of village dominance. So far we define village dominance based on the economic power, but we also use the population. So which group is numerically strong? We also define our village dominance based on that. We also combine the population and the land share. So basically both the numerical power and the economic power and created a new measure of village dominance. And yeah, and we find that our results hold true. Instead of reading and arithmetic, we use the writing as a learning outcome and we find the similar results. Thank you. Thank you.