Who is getting the public goods in India: Some evidence and some speculation

The way you grow up in India, it has long been known, depends on where you grow up. The average child growing up in Orissa in the 1980s was seven times more likely to die in infancy than his or her equivalent in Kerala. His or her mother is four and half times more likely to die in giving birth if she were in Assam than she would be had she been in Kerala? And if she happens to be a girl and born in Rajasthan in the 1980s, the likelihood of her being literate by the time she was 14 was about a quarter of what it would have been had she grown up in Kerala. This is, as Dreze and Sen (1995), among others, have argued is entirely what we might have expected: In 1991, rural Kerala had I7 times as many hospital beds per head as Orissa and 10 times as many as Assam. The fraction of people in rural Orissa with access to medical facilities in their village in 1981 was less than II% compared to 96% in Kerala. In 1991, 93% of villages in Kerala had a middle school but the corresponding fraction in Orissa and Assam was less than 25% and in UP it was less than 15%. What is less often emphasized but equally striking is the extent of variation within a single state: According to the 199I census, less than 7% ofthe villages in Vishakhapatnam district in Andhra Pradesh had middle schools and just over 46% had some educational facility, as against 55% and 100% in Guntur. The district of Rangareddy had only 6% of villages with primary health sub-centers as against almost 40% in Anantapur. Less than 1% of villages in Vishakhapatnam had tapped water compared to 59% in West Godavari. Forty-eight percent of villages in Vishakhapatnam were using electrical power as against essentially 100% in Krishna. Twenty percent of