Does Universal Coverage of Public Telephones Reduce Child Mortality? Evidence from India

Access to communication technologies can be welfare enhancing. Hence, universal access to communication technologies has become a significant policy priority. In this paper, we investigate whether universal access to public telephone helps reduce child mortality. The Village Public Telephone (VPT) program in India was designed to expand public telephony to all villages in the country. We exploit the variation in the expansion of public phones in Indian districts at the start of the program in 1994 and subsequently under a policy shift in 2002 that significantly accelerated coverage, to study the impact on infant mortality. We find significant reduction in infant mortality in districts where the program expanded rapidly in 2002 but which had 0 prior coverage. However, in districts where 25 percent or more villages already had a public telephone, there was no effect of further expansion on infant mortality. Our results show that conditional on some coverage, universal coverage does not improve child health outcomes.