Articles by Samik Chowdhury

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Building on a methodology developed in an earlier paper, the results of an exercise in ranking Indian states based on five sets of criteria--infrastructure, social services, fiscal performance, justice, law and order, and quality of the legislature--are presented to show how states have fared relative to each other between 2001-02 and 2011-12. What emerges is that 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. A consequence of such stickiness of rankings at the top and the bottom is growing regional disparity between the more- and less-developed states.

There is a core concept of good governance, the combination of authority and responsibility to pursue the common good, that has remained stable over millennia. Building on this concept the paper develops several indices of the quality of governance and applies these indices to rank major states in India. The governance indices have been derived from the three main pillars of the government, i e, the legislature, the judiciary and the executive. Performance on each dimension of governance has been measured using indicators that are all based exclusively on factual data, not perceptions. The paper shows that there is a strong correlation between governance quality and the level of development in a state. When we correct for the effect of development on the quality of governance, it turns out that some of the poorer states significantly improve their rank, implying their governance performance is much better than would be expected at their level of development.