Inter Regional Disparities in India an Analysis of Social and Economic Indicators

Abstract

Geographically, India is very diverse country and divided into many parts and regions. Each newlineregion has its own cultural and religious heritage. The distribution of natural resources and newlineman made resources are not similar and vary across the different regions of the country. The newlinelivelihood pattern and the economic activities are very uneven across these regions newlinewhich resulted into occurrence of regional disparity in the country. This inequality may newlinelead to uneven distribution of economic growth and therefore, by a large, it remain the newlinemajor concern of economic policies of the country. newlineRegional disparities with respect to economic and social development have been the newlinekey indicators in the planning process since independence in India. Backwards newlineregions were the priority areas of the government investment and massive investments newlinewere made by the public and private sector to minimize the regional gap. Besides all newlinethese efforts, the achievement could not commensurate with these efforts and still newlineconsiderable level of regional disparities remained prevailed in the country. newlineEducation, poverty reduction and health issue has been the priorities areas of newlineeconomic development since independence. newlineThe present study is segmented into eight chapters. The very first chapter presents the newlinehistorical aspect of inter-regional disparities in India.Many studies have been newlineconducted so far to estimate the regional disparity with respect to specific economic newlineindicators. None of the study was conducted to estimate the aggregate regional newlineinequality by taking into consideration three major economic indicators such as newlineeducation, income and health. newlineThe ensuing eight chapters are proposed to analyze all the states and union territories newlineof India have been divided into five regions. In the present study, weighted coefficient newlineof variation was used to eliminate the population effect as many of the previous used newlineonly standard methodology to estimate regional disparity.On the basis of overall newlineindex, it can be said that although, the northern region o