Seasonal Migration and Child’s Schooling: A Survival Approach

Abstract

The article opts to investigate the long-term effects of parental seasonal migration on a child’s access to school education. The phenomenon of seasonal migration ‘leaving child at home’ or ‘accompanied by’ is a very common feature in the Purulia district where migration is the only viable option to sustain livelihood in lean-agricultural season. Although parents’ migration in such areas seems to be essential for the family economy, lack of parental care is found to be responsible for academic and psychological non-adjustment that affects a child’s education to a great extent. The Cox Regression Hazard Model and the Kaplan–Meier Estimator analysis of school participation have been employed to explore the survival probability of children at varying contexts, viz. migration status, gender, caste and age. The result shows the negative impact of parental migration on school participation of left-behind children leading to early dropout before the completion of the school education cycle.