State Rankings: Five Of The Six Best-Performing States Of 2001 Also Best Performers In 2011

How do Indian states stack up in terms of delivering necessary public goods?

Sudipto Mundle, Samik Chowdhury and Satadru Sikdar have tried to answer this question in a paper for the latest issue (3 September 2016) of Economic and Political Weekly (EPW). The trio has used the quality of service delivery as an important measure for assessing the quality of governance.

The paper has rated Indian states on some strategically selected and key objective indicators; the authors believe that this is more transparent and efficient than doing the analysis based on large data processing. Also, the trio has rightly pointed out that the kind of voluminous data of different varieties used for “large data” exercises is simply not available at the state level in India.

So, the authors have picked five sets of criteria – infrastructure, social services, fiscal performance, justice, law and order and quality of legislature – to show how states have fared between 2001-02 and 2011-12.

Under these sets of criteria, various indicators have been used, like road and power under infrastructure, health and education under social services and so on.

The empirical exercise undertaken by the trio covers 19 major states for which the required data was available. Together, they account for 96 percent of the population.

To control the impact of development on governance outputs, the authors have projected the expected value of a given indicator in a state for its level of development (GSDP) and taken the average of deviations from predicted indicator values to arrive at the state’s development adjusted governance (DAG) score for that output. The sectoral DAG scores have then been averaged to arrive at the “development adjusted governance index” (DAGI) for the state.

Here is how the states stand on different parameters.

1) Infrastructure Delivery

2) Social Service Delivery

3) Fiscal Performance

4) Justice, Law and Order

5) Quality of Legislature

Here are the overall rankings.

Governance Performance Index and Development Adjusted Governance Indices

As is clear from the rankings, five of the six best-performing states of 2001 were also the best performers in 2011. Similarly, four of the six worst performers of 2001 were also among the worst performers of 2011.

The authors note that ‘a consequence of such stickiness of rankings at the top and the bottom is growing regional disparity between the more- and less-developed states.’

This exercise to rank states based on their ability to deliver public goods is an important initiative. It takes on greater importance in the age of competitive federalism.

As action on reforms shifts from the Centre to the states, 31 chief ministers become more important than one Prime Minister. So far the media scrutiny of states’ performance is missing in this country. There is a disproportionately large focus on what the Centre is doing.

However, this is certainly changing in academic circles, as is evident from the various state rankings that are now being published regularly. It is only natural that the media also shift its focus from Delhi to the state capitals.