From CK Nayak
New Delhi: The tiny hill state of Meghalaya despite many constraints has emerged as the fastest-growing state in the whole country with a growth rate of 9.7% in 2013-14, higher than the fastest-growing big state of Madhya Pradesh (9.5%) and several notches ahead of the national growth rate, says a report compiled by IndiaSpend.
IndiaSpend is the country’s first data journalism initiative and a project of Spending & Policy Research Foundation based at Mumbai.
Meghalaya’s growth in GSDP of 9.7% was better than that of Bihar, which had a GSDP growth rate of 9.1%. Meghalaya has also India’s second-lowest unemployment rate (after Gujarat) with 0.4% in rural areas and 2.8% in urban areas in 2011-12.
In fact, most of the Northeastern states including Meghalaya have done better than many developed states and are way ahead than the national average, the IndiaSpend research has revealed.
The eight NE states – Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and
Tripura – are growing fast, educating their people at a rate much faster than the rest of India, reducing their dependence on agriculture, and generally prospering, the research has revealed. But the growth is not creating enough jobs and livelihood opportunities, it added.
In October last year, Meghalaya with a double digit compound average annual growth of 10.8 per cent and Rs 27,300 crore worth GSDP, had emerged as one of the most competitive states in the country among North East states.
This was revealed in a study by Harvard Professor Michael Porter’s Institute of Competitiveness founded by Michael Porter and based at Harvard Business School in Boston, Massachusetts.
As per that study, at current prices Meghalaya’s GSDP was 4.2 billion dollars (Rs 27,300 crore) in 2014-15. The State’s GSDP has expanded at a compound annual growth rate of 10.8% between 2004-05 and 2014-15.
The IndiaSpend research found fewer people (12.8 million) live below the poverty line in the entire North East than in just one large state, Karnataka, which has 12.9 million poor people.
Other thing evident is that while NE states are often clubbed together, the study found, in many cases, wide differences occur. Manipur has the high poverty rate while Sikkim in the same region is just the opposite with high prosperity.
Unemployment in urban areas across all NE states is higher than rural areas and is in line with the national pattern. The states have widely varying rates of poverty, which largely reflect unrest and insurgency.
While 36.9% people live below the poverty line (the ability to spend Rs 1,170 per family per month in urban areas and Rs 1,118 in rural) in Manipur, where a cocktail of insurgent groups have crippled the economy, only 8.2% of the population is below the poverty line in Sikkim, the study found.
But in Sikkim where plentiful hydro power has raised incomes the figures are – Rs 1226 (urban) and Rs 930 (rural).
In Meghalaya, the percentage of population below the poverty line was 17.1% in 2009-10 and fell to
11.9% in 2011-12. Although the number of people below the poverty line might be lower than the national average, the intensity of poverty in these states is much higher.
Poverty in the NE, like the rest of India, is a more rural phenomenon than urban; 11.6 million people of the 12.8 million living below the poverty line are in rural areas. The two main reasons for poverty are under-developed agriculture and unskilled labour, according to the National Institute of Rural Development (NIRD).