in one state in India, our estimates using a nationally-representative panel dataset of rural public schools provides complementary evidence on the likely role of improved monitoring on reducing teacher absence.

In interpreting the result on school inspections, it is useful to consider why there might be variation in the frequency of inspections across villages and what this would imply for a causal interpretation. One obvious explanation is that inspectors are more likely to visit more accessible villages, but the data do not support this hypothesis since there is no correlation between changes in the remoteness index and changes in inspection rates (Table 7).

District-level interviews on school governance in India suggest two important reasons for the variation in inspection frequency (Centre for Policy Research, 2012).<sup>24</sup> The first is staffing. Districts are broken down further into administrative blocks, and schools within blocks are organized into clusters. School supervision is typically conducted by “block education officers” and “cluster resource coordinators”. We find that a significant fraction of these posts are often unfilled. For instance, in 19 percent of the cases (where we have data) even the position of the “District Education Officer (DEO)”, the senior-most education official in a district, was vacant. Further, there is high turnover in education administration (the average DEO had a tenure in office of just one year) creating periods when the positions are vacant during transitions. The lack of supervisory staff at the block-level is even more acute, as 32% of these positions were estimated to be vacant in 2010 (the year of our survey) even by an official government report (13th JRM Monitoring Report, 2011). Our interviews suggest that these staffing gaps at the block and cluster level are the most important source of variation in inspection frequency within districts, since blocks and clusters without supervisory staff are much less likely to get inspected.

The second source of variation in inspections is the diligence of the concerned supervisory officer. Even if all the positions of supervisory staff were filled, there would be variation in the zealousness with which these officers visited villages/schools, which might lead to some areas being inspected more often than others based on whether they were in the coverage area of a more diligent officer or not. However, since supervisors are typically assigned a coverage area of clusters or blocks that comprise many villages, variation in monitoring frequency that is driven by supervisor-level unobservable characteristics is unlikely to be correlated with other village-level characteristics that are also correlated with absence. Of course, this

> 24This module was designed to complement the school surveys by allowing us to create quantitative measures of district-level education governance. Unfortunately, the non-completion rate for these interviews was very high (over 40 percent) due to non-availability, and non-response of district-level administrators. Since this non-response is clearly not random, we do not use the quantitative measures in regressions. Nevertheless, important qualitative insights can be obtained from these interview transcripts. These results are summarized in a companion policy report (Centre for Policy Research, 2012).

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