StatsGuru-05-March-12

This Monday, in StatsGuru (which will now be a weekly feature), we look at whether the headline numbers for the three largest states in which governments are facing re-election – Punjab, Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh – allow observers to determine whether good governance, or populism, can actually be factors in voters’ decisions.

As Tables 1 and 2 show, all three states have grown considerably since the last elections. Uttarakhand, in particular, has been a big achiever under the Bharatiya Janata Party, with income per capita almost doubling. Uttar Pradesh has surprised many, with income per capita rising by almost 63 per cent under the Bahujan Samaj Party government. UP has achieved this even while keeping its total liabilities, as a proportion of state domestic product, under control, as Table 6 demonstrates. Earlier at a worrying 55.6 per cent of SDP at the end of the Samajwadi Party’s tenure, it came down to 43.5 in the Revised Estimates for 2009-10. However, fiscal deficit numbers showed a sharp uptick in the post-financial crisis period, as seen in Table 5. Only Uttarakhand seems to have managed to pull it back a bit.(Click here for table & graph)

Intriguingly, however, Uttarakhand is the only state that has not made strides in reducing transmission and distribution losses to electricity – one sign of a leaky, populist power system. As Table 3 lays out, UP has reduced T&D losses by 10 per cent under the BSP – but Punjab has made progress, too. Meanwhile, UP’s literacy has jumped an impressive 8 percentage points in the same period, as Table 4 shows. As Table 7 demonstrates, social-sector expenditure has increased everywhere – but UP has kept it near-constant as a proportion over the past three years. A simple story cannot be told, therefore, of UP’s or Punjab’s elections being straightforward referendums on populism, or Uttarakhand’s being only about the BJP’s governance.