Tuesday, February 03, 2026

Education matters more than income to reduce premature adult mortality in India

International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis

IIASA researchers explored why mortality among adults of working age remains high in India alongside rapid economic growth, finding that education – at both individual and community levels – is more strongly associated with lower premature mortality than income or household wealth.

Preventing premature death is a key objective of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Economic growth is often expected to improve survival by increasing resources for social protection, public health, and healthcare systems. While India has experienced sustained economic growth, the country accounts for around one fifth of global deaths among adults of working age, and about half of all deaths in India occur before the age of 60, amounting to around three million premature deaths each year. This places India well above the global average, with important consequences for households and the wider economy.

Using nationally representative data from the India Human Development Survey, which follows individuals over time, the IIASA-led study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) examined the relative importance of education and economic resources for mortality among adults of working age (15–59) in India.

The analysis follows more than 115,000 individuals surveyed in 2004–05 and tracked through 2011–12. The authors compared how educational attainment and household economic status are related to the risk of dying during working ages, distinguishing between individual- and community-level effects. The models account for health status, age, marital status, caste, religion, health-related behaviors, employment, place of residence, and region.

The results show that adults with higher levels of education are less likely to die prematurely across all household wealth groups. In contrast, higher household wealth does not show a similarly consistent relationship with mortality once education is taken into account. For both men and women, differences in mortality by education level are larger than those observed by wealth level.

“Education shows a stronger association with survival at working ages than household wealth,” explains lead author Moradhvaj Dhakad, a guest research scholar in the Multidimensional Demographic Modeling Research Group of the IIASA Population and Just Societies Program and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Research Scientist at Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Germany. “This relationship remains after accounting for health conditions, employment, and other background characteristics.”

The study also highlights the role of community context. Adults living in communities with higher average levels of education tend to have lower mortality risks, even after accounting for their own education and economic status, a pattern that is particularly evident among women. By contrast, higher average community wealth does not show a consistent protective relationship with mortality among adults of working age and, in some cases, especially among men, is associated with higher mortality risks.

“Our results show that education matters not only for individuals, but also for the communities they live in. Even after accounting for personal education and economic status, adults in more highly educated communities face lower mortality risks, especially women. This suggests that education shapes social and behavioral environments in ways that influence health beyond individual circumstances,” notes coauthor Erich Striessnig, a senior research scholar in the same research group at IIASA.

To better understand these differences, the researchers examined several possible pathways, including health behaviors, morbidity, occupation, caste, religion, and marital status. The findings show that most of the link between education and mortality at working ages is direct, while the association between household wealth and mortality operates mainly through intermediary factors, including morbidity.

“These patterns suggest that sustained reductions in premature adult mortality in India are unlikely to be achieved through income growth alone but are more strongly associated with long-term investments in education that strengthen individual capabilities and healthier community environments,” says coauthor Samir K.C., a senior research scholar at IIASA. “While growth expands resources and opportunities, it may however also introduce occupational, environmental, and behavioral risks that undermine adult health when not accompanied by investments in education, regulation, and social protection.”

“By showing that education consistently outweighs household wealth as a predictor of survival, not only for children – as has been shown repeatedly in the past – but also for working age populations, the study highlights a clear policy lever for jointly accelerating progress toward the health- and the education-related targets of the SDGs. Expanding access to quality education across the life course, particularly for women and disadvantaged groups, can deliver broad health dividends, saving lives today while building a more resilient and productive society for generations to come,” concludes IIASA Distinguished Emeritus Research Scholar and coauthor Wolfgang Lutz.

Reference
Dhakad, M., Striessnig, E., Saikia, N., KC, S., Lutz, W. (2026). For reducing premature adult mortality in India education matters more than income. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2503809123

The publication fee for this paper will be covered through external funding from the Yidan Prize–supported project (Yidan Prize 25121), which supports research highlighting the role of education in advancing human capital, health, and sustainable development.

About IIASA:
The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) is an international scientific institute that conducts research into the critical issues of global environmental, economic, technological, and social change that we face in the twenty-first century. Our findings provide valuable options to policymakers to shape the future of our changing world. IIASA is independent and funded by prestigious research funding agencies in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. www.iiasa.ac.at

Journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2503809123

Article Title

For reducing premature adult mortality in India, education matters more than income

Article Publication Date

2-Feb-2026

A new class of strange one-dimensional particles

For the first time, researchers describe the properties of one-dimensional anyons and provide the recipe for observing these particles with present-day setups.

Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) Graduate University

New class of adjustable anyons discovered — image:
Graphic illustration of the papers’ findings. A knob labelled with α can be dialed between 0 and 1, showing how it affects the symmetry of two particles during an exchange operation, shown as two Ψs inside mathematical bra-ket notation.
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Credit: Jack Featherstone

Physicists have long categorized every elementary particle in our three-dimensional universe as being either a boson or a fermion—the former category mostly capturing force carriers like photons, the latter including the building blocks of everyday matter like electrons, protons, or neutrons.

But in lower dimensions of space, the neat categorization starts to break down. Since the ‘70s, a third class capturing anything in between a fermion and a boson, dubbed anyon, has been predicted to exist — and in 2020, these odd particles were observed experimentally at the interface of supercooled, strongly magnetized, one-atom thick (that is, two-dimensional) semiconductors. And now, in two joint papers published in Physical Review A, researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) and the University of Oklahoma have identified a one-dimensional system where such particles can exist and explored their theoretical properties.

Thanks to the recent developments in experimental control over single particles in ultracold atomic systems, these works also set the stage for investigating the fundamental physics of tunable anyons in realistic experimental settings. “Every particle in our universe seems to fit strictly into two categories: bosonic or fermionic. Why are there no others?” asks Professor Thomas Busch of the Quantum Systems Unit at OIST. “With these works, we’ve now opened the door to improving our understanding of the fundamental properties of the quantum world and it’s very exciting to see where theoretical and experimental physics take us from here.”

Breaking the boson/fermion binary

The elementary categorization is based on how two identical particles behave when they swap places. Experimental observations suggest a strict binary in 3D: either the particles remain completely unchanged, as in the case of bosons, or the system inverts, as with fermions — no other options seem to exist.

This binary arises from the core principle of indistinguishability in quantum physics. In classical physics, if you’ve got two identical marbles and you paint one red and the other blue, you can tell them apart even if they swap places. But at the quantum level, two identical particles — say, electrons — cannot be painted red or blue. If their quantum properties are identical, they cannot be distinguished. As such, if they swap places, their new configuration is physically indistinguishable from the previous. And because the physical state must remain the same, the measurable properties of this two-particle system cannot change. Raúl Hidalgo-Sacoto, PhD student in the OIST unit, explains: “Because this exchange is equivalent to doing nothing, the mathematical statistics governing the event, known as the exchange factor, must obey a simple rule: the square of the exchange factor must be equal to 1. The only two numbers that satisfy this rule are +1 and -1. That’s why all particles must be, respectively, bosons, for which the factor is 1, or fermions, for which the factor is -1.”

This categorization has physical consequences. Bosons tend to act in uniformity: think of lasers, where photons of the same wavelength (color) move in harmony with each other, or Bose-Einstein Condensates, where ultracold atoms adopt the same state. Fermions, on the other hand, are antisocial: electrons, protons, and neutrons cannot inhabit the same state, which incidentally is why we have a periodic table of different elements.

If we only have two kinds of particles in three dimensions, why can more appear in lower dimensions? The reason is that here, the particles have fewer options for wiggling around one another, and when they cross paths — when they change places — the exchange becomes braided in space and time, meaning that the particles cannot be untangled, ergo the new state is no longer indistinguishable from the previous. Hidalgo-Sacoto continues: “In lower dimensions, this exchange is no longer topologically equivalent to doing nothing. To satisfy the law of indistinguishability, we need exchange factors over a continuous range to account for the exchange, dependent on the exact twists and turns of the paths.”

Thus, a new class of particles that captures particles with an exchange factor other than +1 or -1 can exist: anyons, any -ons that are neither boson nor fermion.

A recipe for adjustable anyons

In the works just published, Hidalgo-Sacoto and colleagues have shown that in 1D space, the binary stays broken with the interesting addition of a directly tunable exchange factor. In 1D, particles can no longer swap places by moving around each other but must instead pass through one another. As such, the exchange factor becomes fundamentally different to the one in higher dimensions — and in fact, the papers show that it is connected to the strength of the short-range interaction between the particles. Experimentally, this allows for fine-grained control over the resulting exchange statistics, suggesting a host of exciting experiments and questions to be both asked and answered. “We’ve identified not only the possibility of existence of one-dimensional anyons, but we’ve also shown how their exchange statistics can be mapped, and, excitingly, how their nature can be observed through their momentum distribution,” summarizes Prof. Busch. “The experimental setups necessary for making these observations already exist. We’re thrilled to see what future discoveries are made in this area, and what it can tell us about the fundamental physics of our universe.”

In three dimensions (plus one time dimension), particles do not cross paths (or braid) when exchanging places, as their trajectories through time can easily be unwound – this is topologically equivalent to doing nothing. As such, the exchange operator, denoted here as P̂, is either plus or minus the original state (or wavefunction, ψ); a boson or a fermion respectively. In 1D, there is no room for the trajectories to wiggle around one another through time — they must cross, and as such the exchange operator depends on the twists and turns of the path, here operationalized as α. Excitingly, the researchers have found the experimental recipe for directly influencing α, allowing researchers control over how bosonic or fermionic the 1D particle is.

Credit

Jack Featherstone