Birth of a state: Who prospers, mother or daughter?

Almost 57 years after it was carved out by merging Teluguspeaking areas and cutting out Marathi and Kannada speaking areas, Andhra Pradesh is now on the carving board again - the Telangana region will now be partitioned off into a new state, induced by a long-standing agitation, but delivered by the political expediency of the Congress.

Whatever be the complex electoral implications of this, the real question is whether people in the two new truncated states benefit from this?

Twelve years ago, three mega-states had seen a similar division. Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh were split and Uttarakhand, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh created. How have these pairs of 'mother-daughter' states fared in these years?

TOI analysed several indicators of economic and social development and found that the mother-daughter states present a mixed record.

Annual growth of the gross state domestic product (GSDP), which is a measure of the way the state's economy is faring, indicates that Bihar is doing better than Jharkhand, MP and Chhatisgarh are doing the same and tiny Uttarakhand is way ahead of 'mother' state UP.

All these states largely depend on agriculture - hence the vagaries of monsoon cause huge ups and downs. But the stress on mining in Jharkhand hasn't propelled it much further. The hill state of Uttarakhand has surged ahead because of rapid industrialization in its plains areas. It has also reaped the rather unsustainable harvest of tourism and hydel power to notch up a phenomenal annual growth rate of 16% in the last eight years.

But Jharkhand races way ahead of Bihar in foodgrain production, clocking an annual growth of 10% even as Bihar languished at a measly 2% between 2001-02 and 2011-12. To be fair, Bihar faced many more challenges, like droughts and floods, and Jharkhand was starting from a very low base.

MP too had double the growth in food grain production than its daughter state Chhattisgarh. Incredibly, Uttar Pradesh and its tiny offspring Uttarakhand both had the same 1% growth in foodgrain output. So again, a mixed bag of results.

What about state governments' attention towards the people? Have smaller states had better social outcomes? Again we found no clear answer.

The infant mortality rate (IMR) in these states has declined across the board over the past decade. Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand showed a 31-point decrease while MP showed a 29-point dip. UP's IMR declined by 23 points but it was still high at 60. All states were converging, although the larger states more slowly than the smaller ones.

Reflecting both, government inaction as also deeply entrenched social prejudices, child sex ratio continued to decline in all six states whether small or big. Worryingly , son preference and female infanticide seem to be creeping into tribal communities in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh too, which were hitherto not so discriminatory against the girl child.

Literacy rates have jumped up in two big states - UP and Bihar - but also in the daughter state of Jharkhand. The MP-Chhatisgarh duo has seen only a small increase in literacy in the past decade.

The two big states of Bihar and UP are severely lagging in school infrastructure - they have just 6 and 7 primary school sections per 1,000 children. Compare that to their daughter states - Jharkhand has 13 and Uttarakhand 17. The MP-Chhatisgarh duo is fairly even on this count. On the other crucial link in the education system - teachers - the bigger states are clear laggards. All three bigger states have higher pupil teacher ratios than their smaller progeny.

Although all these states suffer from chronic unemployment , the implementation of the central government's job guarantee scheme (MGNREGS) is doing better in the two smaller states of Chhattisgarh and Uttarakhand , compared to their 'mother' states. But in Bihar, the average days of employment given is more than its 'daughter' Jharkhand.

So, the performance of a state is not so much determined by its size as by the political will and orientation of its government. Which way will Telangana and the reduced Andhra Pradesh go?