Bihar, Gujarat low on spending inequality: study

As parties gear up for polls, India’s two most talked about non-Congress ruled states — Gujarat and Bihar — have been rated as having lesser spending inequality as compared to most other states of the country.

Updated on: Mar 16, 2014, 02:48:20 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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As parties gear up for polls, India’s two most talked about non-Congress ruled states — Gujarat and Bihar — have been rated as having lesser spending inequality as compared to most other states of the country.

A new government study ranks Gujarat as the state having least inequality in urban areas except four north-eastern states of Manipur, Meghalaya, Nagaland and Mizoram. For rural areas, Bihar earns the top slot after Meghalaya, Nagaland and Sikkim.

The National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) study comes at the time when development models of both Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi and Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar has been under intense public debate.

Modi has been showcasing the Gujarat developmental model across India in his election campaign with Aam Aadmi Party’s convenor Arvind Kejriwal raising questions on the same.

The NSSO study indicates that Nitish Kumar’s model of inclusive growth has brought dividends. In fact, Bihar’s ranking has improved in the last decade as it did better than some other backward states such as Odisha and Jharkhand.

The report could also provide electoral ammunition to both Modi and Nitish as inequality in both rural and urban area for India has increased between 2004-05 and 2011-12. The study shows that inequality ratio has increased from 0.297 to .307 in rural areas and from 0.373 to 0.385 in urban areas.

Unlike the common perception that rising food prices had pinched pockets of the poor and the middle-class, the study depicts a different picture. More than food-cost rise, the cost of education and health upset families’ monthly budgets.

In just two years — 2009 and 2010 — the burden of education increased by about 10% and of non-institutional medical by about 19%. The hike was almost same as increase in cost of these services over a period of six years between 2004-05 and 2009-10.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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