Raghuram Rajan-headed Panel

Raghuram Rajan-headed panel set up by the government to identify criteria to determine a state's relative backwardness came out with its report. It created a new index, and ranked Indian states on it, with 0 being 'not backward at all' and 1 being 'most backward'. For the purposes of distributing Central funds, the committee recommended that states scoring more than 0.6 be declared as 'least developed', those scoring between 0.4 and 0.6 as 'less developed' and the seven states less than that as 'relatively developed'.

To create the index, the panel selected 10 sub-indicators that covered a range of development outcomes and weighted them equally.

Income

Although there's been a growing discussion (led by the Human Development Index) on moving away from purely income-based indicators as a measure of development, income is still an important measure of well-being (and, as we discuss in our last but one graph, with good reason).

Choosing Monthly Per Capita Expenditure (MPCE) derived from National Sample Surveys as the sub-indicator to measure income is not uncontroversial. There's a fair bit of back-and-forth in the report over whether GDP per capita or MPCE better reflects economic well-being. The report finally settles on the latter, and argues that choosing the former would not have made much difference either.

Education

For education, the panel looked at a weighted average of attendance ratios and schools per capita. To keep things simple, we looked only at Primary schools per capita for this infographic. It's not clear that this is a good sub-indicator, as the scattered results show.

Health

For health, the panel looked at one sub-indicator - the Infant Mortality Rate (number of deaths of children under the age of 1 per 1,000 live births) - which experts say indicates not just child health and nutrition, but also other factors like sanitation, disease environment, and access to health facilities.

Household amenities

The fourth sub-indicator the panel looked at is a weighted average of a bunch of Census indicators that show access to basic household facilities.

Poverty

For 'poverty', the panel looked at the recent numbers put out by the Planning Commission, applying the Tendulkar Committee formula to 2011-12 consumption data.

Female literacy rate

Female literacy, which, as a recent report showed, has a direct correlation with a host of other development outcomes including child mortality, was the sixth sub-indicator the panel looked at.

Scheduled castes and tribes

To take into account the state's depth of historical deprivation, the next sub-indicator looks at the state's proportion of scheduled caste and scheduled tribe citizens.

Rate of urbanisation

Next, the panel looked at the proportion of the state that is urbanised, which is an interesting sub-indicator with Himachal Pradesh being one of the notable exceptions; among India's least urbanised states, it is one of its more developed ones.

Financial inclusion

For financial inclusion, the panel looked at the proportion of households who told Census officials that they used banking services.

Connectivity

And finally, for physical connectivity, the panel looked at both road and rail route lengths. We've looked at just road length here because of some data issues with rail length.

So there you have it, the ten sub-indicators that the Rajan panel used, for some insight into how Bihar and Odisha became India's least developed states and Goa and Kerala the most developed.