GUWAHATI: In the past 27 years, Assam’s social expenditure has grown by 15.1% (1997-2017), which is among the highest in the country. However, the benefits of this growth has not reached people because of various factors such as the presence of institutional blocks, lack of awareness and implementation issues according to the Economic Research Department of the State Bank of India.
Thus, Assam’s Human Development Index (HDI), which measures the average subnational values of three dimensions, education, health and standard of living have slipped in this period.
“To check the validity of whether increased social expenditure does push up the HDI ranking, we looked into the CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of social expenditure between 2017 and 1990. The correlation between growth in social expenditure and improvement in HDI scores is low, which reveals that presence of institutional bottlenecks, lack of awareness and implementation issues are still present and hence the benefits of increased social expenditure is uneven across Indian states with some states like Haryana clearly benefiting, but some like Assam not so,” the report stated.
Analyzing the region-wise trend of HDI scores, the report suggests that southern states and northern states have performed better while eastern states have not done so well.
The report mentioned that “NE states, which have rapidly cached up in HDI value and were well performed among other regions, have slowed down in the recent period and even the HDI value is declining.”