Essays on equality of opportunity in rural india

This thesis consists of three essays on equality of opportunity, deprivation, and collective action in rural India. The first two chapters study intergenerational educational mobility, focusing on how land ownership, subsistence constraints, and child labour shape children’s chances of surpassing their parents in schooling. The third examines whether the 2020–21 farmers’ protest movement affected village-level public spending and distributive politics in Punjab. Chapter 2 documents a sharp nonlinearity between land ownership and educational mobility. Using full-count rural microdata from the Socio-Economic and Caste Census of 2011, I show that moving from landlessness to very small land ownership is associated with a large increase in the probability that children of uneducated fathers attain basic schooling beyond their parents, while additional land yields much smaller gains. Exploiting a historical discontinuity in land tenure institutions along the Konkan–Deccan border in Maharashtra, I show that landlessness causally reduces upward educational mobility by roughly 12 to 14 percentage points. Chapter 3 develops a model of this first-acre effect. Land is a productive asset that relaxes subsistence pressure. Households below subsistence rely on child labour, reducing schooling effort and mobility. Once landholdings cross a threshold, households enter an unconstrained regime in which schooling and child labour are chosen by trading off current and future returns. The model generates a step-and-plateau relationship between land and mobility, and the empirical evidence supports the mechanism: child labour falls and school attendance rises sharply at the extensive margin of land ownership. Chapter 4 studies whether villages more exposed to the 2020–21 farmers’ protest movement experienced changes in panchayat spending. Using monthly administrative data on village spending, protest-event locations, and census covariates, I find that treatment definitions combining proximity to protest sites with agricultural dependence produce meaningful postprotest increases in spending, especially NREGA spending. The results are consistent with inclusive mobilisation changing local distributive priorities. Together, these essays show how unequal opportunity in rural India is shaped by both material deprivation and political voice. Landlessness limits schooling by tightening subsistence constraints, while collective mobilisation can alter the allocation of village resources and reshape the distribution of local public goods.