Determinants of Private Demand - Regional Disparity

There is imbalance in distribution of facilities. There are over 600000 villages in India. And there were over 8737 degree colleges and 2409 colleges of professional education in the year 2002. Naturally every village cannot have a college. There are three categories of students in terms of distance between their place of residence and location of the college: students who live in cities or large and medium towns where colleges are located; students who live in large villages having transport facilities to cities and towns where colleges are located; remote rural areas which are not well connected to towns and cities either by road or other modes of transport. Students from remote rural areas have additional problems in pursuing higher education as compared to those who live in towns and cities or large villages having infrastructure facilities.

There are also problems of boarding and lodging which involves extra cost. The problems of imbalanced distribution of opportunities is more pronounced in the case of post graduate education and research which is normally pursued in universities and post graduate centres attached to them. There are 272 Universities in the country. With the exception of a few rural universities/centres they are located in urban centres. Students from rural areas find it difficult to pursue their education in colleges and Universities.

A study conducted to assess the personal profiles, interpersonal relations and leadership patterns of rural students in the urban metropolis of Bangalore city during 1980-81 (Seetharamu, 1985) had revealed that one-third of the rural students securing admission to post graduate courses could not enrol themselves. A follow up study revealed that their main problem was that of boarding and lodging. They did not have any kinship group in the city as they were first generation migrants. There were community/caste group hostels to which they did not belong. They could not get access to general hostels run by the government either due to lack of information or due to pressure on the limited capacity. This fact lays bare the region specificity of educational opportunity as an important determinant of private investment in education. Many students simply forego the educational opportunity because of the heavy marginal costs.