South vs North: India라이브 바카라 Great Divide by Nilakantan R.S. | Book Excerpt

India라이브 바카라 states are disparate and divergent in the extreme, as the data on health, education and economy reveals. In health, the difference between the best and worst states is as wide as that between the OECD countries and sub-Saharan Africa. In education, it라이브 바카라 as wide as that between middle-income and low-income countries. In terms of economic prospects, the better-off states are two to three times richer than the poorest. Overall, southern India is a vastly different place from central and northern India.

The degree of divergence of India라이브 바카라 states demands policymaking and fiscal sovereignty at the state level for effective governance. After all, it라이브 바카라 impossible for one entity to make a single policy decision that can apply equally effectively to both Afghanistan and the United States in health, for example. But India라이브 바카라 Union government is increasingly trying to assume such an impossible role.

The solutions to the problems of these various societies and states, as the previous part details, are often ones that are orthogonal to each other, given their developmental trajectories. For example, the southern states need to focus on output metrics in education while the northern states need to get children into school and keep them there. The southern states need to focus on chronic health issues and possibly elder care, given their demographics and current achievements, while the northern states need to focus on pre- and postnatal healthcare delivery. These differences seep into almost all areas of public policy, making any centralized policy unwieldy and impossible to implement.

In this scenario of increasing divergence in development and governance metrics, the additional complicating factor of divergence in population growth makes a difficult problem impossible to solve. The population skew towards the states in the Indo-Gangetic plains, which also happen to be poorer and less developed, has created a problem that라이브 바카라 unique to India in some ways. The less developed states have more political power, owing to their larger populations, and they are threatening to accrue even more political power to themselves in the near future, thereby cornering more resources for themselves and starving the states that are doing well.

The southern states are caught in this peculiar bind: they are doing well because they have achieved stable populations through good governance, which is exactly what threatens to rob them of political power and resource allocation. And this threat fructifies precisely at a time their citizens have come to expect relatively better government services from their states and are seeking to customize them even further to their changing needs.

Consider Telangana. Data shows the state has the highest negative differential in its budget between the amount of money it receives from the Union versus the money it raises from its own citizens via state taxes. That is, its citizens pay the most into state taxes because their share of the Union transfers isn’t enough to run the state government. This increasing burden of taxation is placed on the citizens of Telangana while, simultaneously, their democratic power to influence that decision-making is under threat of being diluted.

This is a question with no easy answers for the southern states. The status quo condemns them to receiving less in transfers, giving more in taxes and sacrificing political power – all because they have been successful. The southern states also happen to be linguistically and culturally distinct from the north, which adds a whole new dimension of political complexity. The definition of a nation – a linguistically and culturally distinct people living in a geographically contiguous region – applies to these states better than to most European countries.

One simplistic, risky and often unviable option that has been considered in the past in this country and in several other countries too is the politics of explicit secession. That often hardens stances on both sides and descends into violence.

It라이브 바카라 a high-risk option that probably isn’t a good solution in the first place. Divergence within a large system is a symptom of structural flaws. A simple realignment of the map with the same structure of governance is likely to yield the same problem downstream in two countries instead of in one, even if the secession magically did not descend into violence.

A democratically just way of organizing society into layers that will solve resource allocation issues and sidestep the perverse incentives for population growth is difficult to arrive at. The next part of the book will analyse the existing structure of government and consider the possible ways in which one may arrive at a stable, peaceful and just system that accurately represents the will of the people at all levels.

(Excerpted from South vs North: India라이브 바카라 Great Divide by Nilakantan R.S. with permission from Juggernaut Books)