Files
Abstract
Access to piped water at home is often unavailable to people living in the rural areas of many developing countries. Providing in-house piped water connections can reduce the time spent in collecting water from outside sources by different household members, especially women and girls. In this paper, we use variation in the non-self-community ratio of access to piped water for predicting household access and its effect on time savings and school outcomes for children in rural India. The results indicate that there are time savings for households that have access to piped water, which in turn reduces the number of days children miss school annually. Furthermore, this study addresses the issue of endogeneity to some extent by using child and household fixed effects along with the non-self-community ratio as an instrumental variable for household access to piped water.