First published: Thursday, 19 January 2006

Anandan is an unusual teaching institution in Calcutta. It aims to provide all-round, supplementary education to very poor slum children.

It was started in 1999 by a group of middle-class housewives, among them my sister. They did a survey of slums near their homes, were dismayed by the poverty and paucity of education the children received and so they started out with 10 students and one teacher, whom they paid out of their own pockets.

The aim was not to replace the children's regular schooling - whatever meagre schooling they may have been getting - but to provide additional skills - logic, elementary English and, generally, the excitement of knowledge. 

The hope was that a few would find their imagination sparked and would break away from the indigence into which they had been born.

Over the past two years Anandan attracted the attention of sponsors, Indian and international, and has grown substantially. It has moved into its own rented premises and has more than 200 children - the slums of Calcutta having a supply to match any facility.

Because of my interest in child literacy and labour, I recently visited Anandan. Initially, the children, sitting all scrubbed and clean, with their notebooks and pencils, were diffident about this "visiting teacher".

Aptitude tests

After several attempts to make them talk, one of them nervously showed me her written work. And when I praised it, there were others; and soon the classroom was a sea of waving banners and smiling faces shouting answers to my questions. It was a heartening sight - never mind that some of the youngest ones, unused to male teachers, referred to me as "Miss".

What was of special interest to me is that the school has collected information on the children's household conditions and kept records of aptitude tests taken by children aged nine to 16 years.

They were made to answer questions like:

1. Red, Blue, Sandesh and Green went for a walk. One of them was not supposed to go with them. Which one? (Sandesh, as all Calcuttans know and are willing to court diabetes for the love of, is a milk-based dessert.)

2. If the first four numbers of a sequence are 0, 3, 6, 9, what will the fifth number be?

3. If the first five numbers of a sequence are 1, 0, 12, 0, 123, 0, what will the seventh number be?

Almost everybody got the first one right (sandesh), more than half got the second one (12) but virtually no-one got the last one.

There were also general knowledge questions, like: which is the highest mountain peak in the world? Most got it right though there were a few exotic answers. My favourite was the one from the boy who insisted it was Switzerland. 

This data allow us to study what influences a child's intellectual skills. My interest in this subject arose from a different kind of finding on child welfare that was implied by the work of economists, Shelley Lundberg, Robert Pollak and Terry Wales, based on UK expenditure survey data.

Income support

One standard way to help a poor child that has been used through the ages is to give an income supplement to the child's parents. Not much thought was given to who the money should be handed to.

In Britain, prior to 1977, a child tax allowance (CTA) was given to households with children below 16 years of age. The allowance was given, typically, to the father. 

Then, over the next two years, the CTA was replaced by a lump-sum payment called Child Benefit, which was paid directly to the mother.

Exploiting this change of policy, the economists were able to demonstrate that who brings the money home makes a difference to child welfare. Expenditure on children's clothing, for instance, was higher if, with total income remaining the same, a larger fraction came from the mother.

Subsequent studies have tried to show that, more generally, a rise in the woman's status in the household tends to positively impact on the children's economic well-being.

From the data from Anandan it is possible to seek an answer to a different but related question: Can a child's intellect be affected by his or her household conditions? 

What a first analysis of the numbers show is quite striking. A child's aptitude correlates very little with a variety of indicators like the child's mother tongue (the school has Hindi and Bengali-speaking children), the number of siblings the child has or, more surprisingly, even the income and wealth of the child's parents. 

But one variable that stands out as a strong correlate is whether the mother chats a lot with the child and, more surprisingly, whether the mother and the father chat a lot among themselves (this reflects, more than anything else, the status of the mother). If the answer to these is yes, then the child's aptitude is likely to be significantly higher.

These are preliminary findings. One will have to do further tests to tease out the direction of causality. Hence, for now, these results must be handled with caution; but, nevertheless, it is remarkable that variables, which are so far removed from a child's answer to the aptitude questions above, seem to influence them so significantly.

And, finally, for readers interested in question three, the answer is: 1234.

 Dr. Kaushik Basu, Professor of Economics and Carl Marks Professor of International Studies at Cornell University

This article first appeared on the BBC News Column published in Thursday, 19 January 2006.