Development and Infrastructure Disparity across Indian Hill States: An Analysis

Abstract

 Development disparity is anomnipresence phenomenon at global, continent, country and province level. At global level countries have been categorized into developed, developing and underdeveloped realm. This research has a fresh look on development and infrastructure disparity across the Indian hill states in post reform period. It reveals that no significant change in terms of development disparity in the first decade of liberalized economy across hill states. However, in the first decade of 21^st century the development disparity ratio decreased from 0.29 in 2001 to 0.25 in 2011 and development index of all hill states increased from 0.40 in 2001 to 0.48 in 2011. It reflects that after a decade of reforms convergence of development took place in hill states. Infrastructure plays an important role for development. For this, the value of the coefficient of correlation between development and infrastructure indices of 2011 was worked out. It is +0.85. This reveals that development of hill states is strongly associated with the infrastructure development. Furthermore, the analysis reveals that the most of northeast hill states and Jammu & Kashmir have infrastructural deficit. Therefore, it is recommended that Union and State Governments should pay more heed towards north-east in infrastructural development.