My apologies for OT but there is a mild groupthink (or accepted wisdom) on BRF that South and West India have reached very high literacy, Income and life expectancy standards while North and Eastern states are way way way way behind.gakakkad wrote:our literacy is 75 %..most of the present illiterates are older people...by 2020 literacy will be 90% + as the older illiterate population would have passed away..enrolment to primary school is close to 100% now in many states...life expectancy is 67 ...in south and west india it must be 75+...
I don't question that N and E are lagging West and South, but the difference is much smaller than what many here think.
Check Life expectancy table for India states at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_In ... y_at_birth. South and West are clearly doing better but 3 out of top 6 states in life expectancy are in North. and I am sure Delhi and most of North East would be above (even excluding Delhi). Average life expectancy of South and west India is no more than 1.5-2 yr above India average and about 3-3.5 years above North and Eastern states. Except Kerala and possibly Punjab, Delhi and Goa, there is no state with 70+ life expectancy as of now.
And while I don't have the ready numbers to share, I am quite sure that as percentage improvement in basic hygiene and literacy levels is faster in North and East (starting from lower levels as shown in literacy chart below) in the last decade, life expectancy gap also is also probably reducing.
And the difference in Literacy levels is even lesser between South/West and North/East India and this gap too is narrowing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_sta ... eracy_rate
Sorry for OT again but I believe that these kind of statements get rarely questioned on BRF. This is especially galling as even the best (top quartile) of our states (South or otherwise) are behind many African countries, Sri Lanka and most Chinese states on these parameters. Even Bangladesh has better life expectancy than not just India but our 'best performing' Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Maharashtra. So we are all in it together.