The Best States Of India

In a year ravaged by the pandemic, the competitive spirit helped some states overcome adversity better than others. Presenting India Today’s annual State of the States survey and rankings

- Kaushik Deka

INDIAN POLITICS HAS BEEN seeing an encouraging trend in the past few years. Every chief minister who is freshly elected to the office makes an identical promise: to make his state among the five top performing ones in the country. The assurance may or may not come to fruition, but the lofty goal itself is a sign of the changing socio-political ambitions of the people and their expectations from the ruling class. It fosters competition among chief ministers, making all-encompassing economic growth the centrepiece of any political narrative. And in an economy ravaged by a year and a half of the Covid-19 pandemic, this motivation and competition can come in particularly useful.

The India Today Group can claim some of the credit for firing this competitive spirit. It was the first to introduce the concept of mapping the performance of India’s states in 2003 in the form of the State of the States (SoS) survey. In the 19 years since, it has remained the most accurate annual report card of how the different states of India are doing. It was devised as a comprehensive and credible measure for assessing a state’s socioeconomic development to begin with, but, over the years, it has also evolved both in scope and methodology.

To avoid giving undue advantage or vice versa to states with a legacy of performance or under-achievement, the evaluation is carried out under two broad categories—best performing and most improved. The best performing category examines the absolute numbers of a state’s performance for the latest year for which data is available. The most improved category records states’ progress over the preceding five years.