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| India and Pakistan luminous Map at Night Shows Prosperity Level |
Satellites from the US Air Force Defence Meteorological Satellite Programme circle the earth 14 times a day and record lights from the earth's surface at night with sensors. They superimposed a map depicting India's districts on their images, allowing them to develop a unique data set of luminosity values, by district and over time.
Using data generated by the night lights, Economists Praveen Chakravarty and Vivek Dehejia studied of 387 of 640 districts in 12 states. These districts account for 85% of India's population and 80% of its GDP. Some 87% of parliamentary seats are in these districts. Using the novel methodology, the economists documented income divergence in India.
Most of India is dark at night because there is little economic activity going on. But the delicate tracery of lights as seen from space also showed that the states are becoming more unequal between and within them.
Why inequality in India is at its highest level in 92 years
Some 380 districts in 12 states were on average just a fifth as bright as the big cities of Mumbai and Bangalore.
Also, 90% of all the districts are just a third as bright in the night as the top 10% of all districts.
And the ratio has worsened between 1992 - a year after India embraced economic reforms - and 2013.
While the pre-1991 years show a modest trend towards convergence of income between different states, the years after show widening divergence.
By 2014, the economists found, the average person in the three richest states (Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra) was three times as rich as the average person in the three poorest states (Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh).
"What we find is that both across states and across districts with each state, this is a wide, and widening disparity in economic activity. No, it is not that the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, but that the poor are not getting richer fast enough to close the gap with the already rich," says Dr Dehejia, a senior fellow at the Mumbai-based think tank IDFC Institute.
In other words, less developed states are falling behind the more prosperous states.
"This is a level of regional inequality unprecedented in large federal states in contemporary world economic history."
Comparison with Neighboring Nations
If we compare the progress of India with its neighboring nation like Pakistan, we see that India is far ahead.
We could see few luminous lights and majority of them are at northern Punjab and K.P, whereas; Sindh along with national high way and Karachi is also lit, unfortunately Balochistan, Southern K.P, Southern Punjab and upper Sindh are shaded in the darkness. This is evident that there is a large gap of prosperity among different communities among the Pakistan.
Source : BBC