Being a resident of a big city or a more developed district can offset some of the disadvantages of being from a marginalised community, new data has shown.
In majority of India’s districts, Muslims, Dalits and Adivasis had worse education, health, economic and material well-being levels, a new District Development Index has shown. But in India’s better-developed districts, these groups had better development outcomes than upper caste Hindus in the less-developed districts of north and east India.
Economist Abusaleh Shariff, executive director of the US India Policy Institute in Washington D.C., led the research, released by Vice-President Hamid Ansari on Thursday. To construct a District Development Index, Mr. Shariff and his team looked at 17 parameters under four heads — economic, education, health and material well-being. Each of the four was equally weighted to construct a composite District Development Index.
India’s big cities dominate the top of the list, with Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai and Mumbai in the top 20, along with Mohali, Chandigarh and Aizawl and Goa. The southern States, Delhi, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Haryana in the north and the north-eastern States dominate the list of 107 districts which make up the “most-developed” section of the index. The bottom 100 is dominated by Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand and Odisha.
Of the four sub-indices, districts do better on material well-being — access to LPG, electricity and assets. In some States, districts do worst on economic sub-indices — monthly per capita income, number of households below the poverty line, households with earning family members — while in others, health is the stumbling block. The report derived its data from the 2011-12 round of the National Sample Survey Office and 2007-8 Health Ministry data.
The index came in for its share of criticism as well. Farah Naqvi, former member of the National Advisory Council, criticised what she called a “gender-blind” index.
