(This two-part explainer is drawn from a recent study undertaken by the InfoSphere team at the Centre for New Economics Studies, OP Jindal Global University. Read Part one here. For details on the Access Inequality Index (AEI) report, please see here.)
The Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) campaign in all the states has been a distant reflection of Modi’s 2014 campaign, as the saffron party has been driven to address the more immediate issues of people. We have also seen how the BJP’s state assembly performance record (outside the Hindi-belt states) hasn’t particularly done well under the Brand Modi umbrella push. In other words, local governance, and socio-economic factors have played a dominant role in how the poor and those at the margins vote for the state elections.
As a result, state elections quite often, have contributed to producing different voting patterns as against the national elections (people vote with different intentions in each).
The national opposition to the BJP, Indian National Congress’ campaign in all the upcoming five state assemblies, has successfully driven home the point that an overdose of Hindutva and big business development, often leading up to cronyism, under the BJP’s regime at the Centre, have resulted in a neglect of issues like farming crisis, unemployment, inflation, and poor public health and education infrastructure.
What we try to do here – building from the first article in the series, is to assess each state’s socio-economic performance across five pillars from our AEI work below. It helps provide a summative idea of the nature of social, economic, and also political challenges (for incumbent and contesting parties) that are relevant for the electorate (and similarly to win over them).
The AEI index’s composite rank scores are determined from their performance across five main pillars:
1. Access to Basic Amenities
2. Access to Education
3. Access to Healthcare
4. Access to Socio-economic Security
5. Access to Justice.
The conceptualisation of the term ‘access’ is drawn in our work from a critical assessment of the public health literature, which studies access from the perspective of affordability, availability, approachability, and appropriateness (see here for more in these explained in the report). We explain each of these in short below:
Availability: This measures physical access or in other words, presence, demographic coverage, and volume of service or institutions or opportunities available to the population (household and individuals).
Approachability: This measures geographical access or in other words, the ability of households/individuals to access the services.
Affordability: This measures financial access, or in other words, the relationship between the prices of the services and providers to the household’s or individuals’ income and their ability to pay for accessing the services.
Appropriateness: This measures the adequacy of the services by assessing the balance between the need and service provision in terms of content, effectiveness, timeliness, and quality.
To assess all the 4As above, our Index’s primary look is at assessing the household-level data or access granted to individuals across states and UTs collected from various national sources as provided in the report sources here. The data for some of the indicators could be as old as 2016 due to a lack of recent available government data.
However, for most of the indicators we have tried to capture the latest possible data available. We have also tried to map and cover the four dimensions of “Access” across all the indicators to the extent possible.
Access to Basic Amenities
Basic amenities are one of the five pillars of the Access (In)Equality Index. While evaluating the states in terms of access to basic amenities, multiple factors are taken into consideration. This includes the dimensions of clean drinking water, sanitation, nutrition, housing, and digital access.
The AEI framework ranks all states and UTs across India in determining their performance in terms of access to basic amenities. However, with respect to the five poll-bound states, Mizoram is the highest-ranked, with a score of 0.906.
The states of Rajasthan and Telangana have attained somewhat favourable scores in the categories used to assess access to basic amenities, with respective values of 0.646 and 0.669. Water scarcity remains one of the crucial issues bothering the residents of Rajasthan. Despite the government's Jal Jeevan Mission, while several households with tap connections do not receive water, pipelines have not reached in many other areas.
Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh have the lowest ratings, specifically 0.211 and 0.196, respectively. The percentage of people living in pucca houses in MP is 45.2 percent according to NFHS-5. However, it is still below the national average of 60.3 percent.
Access to Education
While evaluating states in terms of access to education, the elements under discussion compose an extensive range of secondary education facets. This includes net enrollment ratio, net attendance ratio, average annual dropout rate, average household expenditure per child, pupil-teacher ratio, secondary schools at a distance of 2 km, availability of toilets for girls, schools offering vocational education, per capita spending by state governments and digital infrastructure such as functional computer and internet facilities.
Out of the five poll-bound states, Rajasthan ranks first in the access to education category, achieving a score of 0.512. CM Ashok Gehlot while addressing the rally in Neem ka Thana mentioned Rajasthan as the 'hub of education' with institutions from IIT to AIIMS present in the region. The state government has opened 6000 Mahatma Gandhi English medium schools that are providing education to over 6 lakh children.
Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Telangana have achieved satisfactory performance, with ratings of 0.48, 0.452, and 0.475, respectively.
Mizoram has the lowest score of 0.397. Factors such as teaching quality, the efficiency of the teachers, and inadequate infrastructure are the most common hindrances to human resource development in the state.
Access to Health
For evaluating states in terms of access to healthcare, the dimensions assessed encompass reproductive health, health insurance, immunisation, government hospitals, and beds, population and area covered by sub-centers, teleconsultation funds, and public expenditure.
Of the five poll-bound states, Rajasthan achieves the highest position in this particular setting, with a score of 0.594. It is closely trailed by Telangana at 0.578. Achieving a score of 0.441, Mizoram follows Telangana.
In contrast, Madhya Pradesh has the lowest ranking, with a score of 0.360. The healthcare access score of Chhattisgarh is quite similar to that of Madhya Pradesh, with a value of 0.387. Given that many district hospitals of Chhattisgarh were newly built, during the pandemic they neither had the manpower nor resources. The state was, therefore, one of the worst affected.
Access to Socio-Economic Security
Socio-economic security plays a crucial role in reducing the vulnerability of citizens to certain risks and enables them to manage those risks. The dimensions here taken into consideration by the Access (In)Equality Index are access to bank accounts and ATMs, access to decent work and access to benefits and assistance.
Of the five states, Telangana is the highest-ranked state in terms of access to socio-economic opportunities, with a score of 0.817. From weavers to farmers, the state provides life insurance to different groups.
In contrast, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Mizoram, and Rajasthan have exhibited low performance in this category, with scores of 0.309, 0.247, 0.352, and 0.243, respectively.
Access to Justice (Legal Recourse)
The pillar of ‘access’ to justice examines access to a safe and secure environment for legal recourse. The indicators for assessing this pillar include pending cases, human resources, physical and digital infrastructure, and the representation of women.
Out of the poll-bound states, Madhya Pradesh achieved the highest score of 0.615. The remaining states have performed satisfactorily, although there is still room for improvement in terms of access to justice. Chhattisgarh, Mizoram, Rajasthan, and Telangana have achieved scores of 0.465, 0.342, 0.421, and 0.511, respectively.
Given that the State Assembly Elections are a test run for the upcoming 2024 General Elections, it becomes crucial to examine the current scenario of the states. By pinpointing areas needing intervention, policymakers can craft targeted strategies, fostering balanced regional development.
Beyond the factors discussed here, as per recent media reports and pre-state election analyses, in all of the four states, agrarian issues have emerged as the biggest grievance among the electorate. One of us has discussed the concerns around the farming crisis (at a national level) before which remain consistent with what is seen at the grassroots level (in the states going to polls).
In the current season too, most farmers are likely to get poorer rates for their crop yield, have drought-related complaints, and face accrued water crisis in the absence of insufficient planned irrigation, high electricity prices, corruption in administrative offices, amidst high debt level faced by farmers, stagnant wages, and multiple other problems that have emerged as a result of a failing agrarian economy.
Election-related media reports have shown that voters are beginning to articulate a degree of fatigue against Hindu-Muslim polarisation on which BJP has depended a lot politically, even as they speak increasingly about older development issues like agrarian crisis, social welfare, and social justice.
The Congress too, according to reports, has also not been defensive over the frequent raids on their leaders ahead of the polls and has attacked the BJP for allegedly misusing the central investigation agencies for political gains. The BJP, on the other hand, has dismissed such claims and attacked the Congress by harping mostly on its usual criticisms – pointing out the prevalence of dynastic politics, alleged corruption, and “freebie culture” in the grand old party.
Drawing from the state-level performance metrics of AEI, and a closer ethnographic assessment of pre-state election analysis, the run-up to the latest round of assembly elections indicate to what extent issues of social justice and welfare, especially those surrounding the agrarian economy, are likely to dominate even the Lok Sabha polls hopefully.
(Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™)
(Deepanshu Mohan is a Professor of Economics and Director, the Centre for New Economics Studies (CNES), Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities, O.P Jindal Global University. Samragnee Chakraborty is a Senior Research Analyst (CNES) and Aryan Govindakrishnan is a Research Assistant with CNES.)
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