The cultural diversity of India makes it hard to compare to any other single country and it often useful to think of it as we would of the European Union. This can be extended to  the way we think about India’s level of economic development, where the national average obscures the extremes. Of course state level figures can be equally misleading with Maharashtra, the wealthiest state in terms of GDP also reporting the highest number of debt-related suicides of any state for a continuous period since 2006. However, they are a relatively uncontroversial way of trying to compare regions, and the availability of annual statistics produced by state and non-state agencies make it a convenient comparison to make.Now any ranking of states will reflect the weight and importance given to different measures of development. If for instance we look at the 2011-12 figures for just Per Capita Net Domestic Product at Constant Prices (Base 2004-05) – or the average annual income of residents adjusted for inflation – then small states with some very wealthy residents like Delhi(1) and Chandigarh(2) would dominate the rankings. However larger states like Maharashtra(4), Gujarat(7) and Tamil Nadu(5) also do quite well in this regard and their figures are probably a more accurate reflection of what the average person earns than in the case of Delhi and Chandigarh. On the other hand if we were to look at an index that takes into account a whole range of factors like the Human Development Index (HDI), then small states like Chandigarh(1) and Delhi(4) continue to dominate, but there’s a reshuffle of the larger states with Maharashtra(11) dropping seven places and Gujarat(23) dropping sixteen places.

It’s interesting to see that states in the Northeast and Kerala are ranked high on HDI, but rank much lower on per capita NDP. Sanghamitra Bandhopadhyay  points out in her blog hosted on the LSE site, that India’s regional development has been particularly uneven characterised by a high-income and low-income club, with a couple of states like West Bengal, starting off rich, then going into decline in the 1970s and 1980s, and others like Tamil Nadu, which started off with a low base but has improved steadily to emerge amongst the wealthier states. The graphic below indicates what how relative income levels in different states have moved over the period between 1965 and 1995.

Source: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/indiaatlse/2013/02/18/why-is-economic-growth-across-indian-states-uneven/

As can be seen, few states have transitioned from poor to rich in that period, though it would be revealing to look at what has happened over the past few years. One way of trying to measure economic performance is to look at growth rates achieved by different states, with the caveat that states starting with a low base would naturally benefit in this comparison. However keeping in mind the large disparities indicated by the above analysis one can contextualise this within a larger narrative of those states which have had a head start and those that have traditionally been economically weak.

Data Source: Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation

Here again wealthy states like Maharashtra and Gujarat have average annual growth rates of above 10%, but arguably the achievement of a state like Bihar, which has emerged from relative obscurity is much greater. Similarly Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal have made considerable progress. The stand-out state for me is Kerala, which has maintained a high level of growth but also scores well on HDI (see the HDI map above, Kerala is the thin dark state on the south western corner of the peninsula).

In the context of the on-going debate on merits and demerits of various development models, while it is clear that consensus is not easy, the Kerala example illustrates that there might be ways of promoting economic growth without sacrificing other social and economic aspects of the development process, and some might say one is meaningless without the other. With the upcoming elections, and political debate centred around issues of development, it is essential that we dwell on the alternatives being presented by various political parties in a deeper and more engaged manner. At the risk of polarising the debate, I would ask why the Gujarat model is being touted given that it has been amongst the high-income club since the 1960s, ranks number 23 in the HDI index and has managed a rate of growth which is only marginally above that of Andhra Pradesh but below that of Tamil Nadu and even that of Bihar.