A New Way of Rankings ‘The State in States’
Posted : September 18, 2006 at 11:03 am [IST]
After going through the fourth annual ‘India Today’ rankings of states of India, I was thinking of verifying it somehow. As I have plenty of time, I came out this unique thumb rule to create my own judgment. I tried to find out the number of entries against each state in sequence ranked by ‘India Today’ in Goggle. The result is as below:
13,700,000 for Punjab; 20,700,000 for Kerala; 4,880,000 for Himachal Pradesh; 15,800,000 for Tamil Nadu; 6,600,000 for Haryana; 12,300,000 for Maharashtra; 12,100,000 for Gujarat; 14,600,000 for Karnataka; 3,860,000 for Uttaranchal; 12,900,000 for Andhra Pradesh; 6,040,000 for Jammu & Kashmir ; 10,800,000 for Rajasthan; 10,200,000 for West Bengal ; 6,420,000 for Madhya Pradesh; 2,580,000 for Chhattisgarh; 7,830,000 for Assam; 7,190,000 for Uttar Pradesh; 6,950,000 for Orissa; 4,950,000 for Jharkhand ; and 13,900,000 for Bihar
(Figures at 5.30 AM on September 18, 2006)
Kerala tops in Goggle way of ranking followed by Tamil Nadu, and Karanataka at second and third position. However, the surprise is for the fourth position. It is Bihar at the fourth followed by Andhra Pradesh at the fifth and Rajasthan at six. But if one combines Jharkhand in Bihar as it was only few years ago, Bihar may rank second to Kerala. Surprisingly Uttar Pradesh does stand any chance of good rank. Is it not interesting?
What do the figures indicate? Does it show the concerns of so many writers, economists, columnists, and historians about Bihar? Is it because of a huge number of Internet users from Bihar?
A similar surprise can be seen in the latest Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) India that must be the eye-opener to those who treat Bihar lowly. Bihar fares badly when it comes to school infrastructure, out-of-school-children percentage and access to learning material, but its children manage to top the nation’s list when it comes to learning abilities. Out-of-school-children percentage in Bihar was highest in the country at 13.5 per cent, while Karnataka’s was just 1.9 per cent. Only about 52.4 per cent had access to textbooks in the Bihar’s primary schools, when in Karnataka the figure was nearly 90 per cent. Yet, when it came to learning skills, Bihar’s children came in fifth in the country for reading skills and third for their arithmetic skills. Karnataka occupied fourth place from the bottom when it came to reading and took the last place in the country when it came to arithmetic skills!
However, I shall like to tell the political leaders of and from Bihar why can’t they work together to see that Bihar gets its right honourable position instead of fighting with each other prove their supremacy?
Respected (?) Lalu, Nitish, and Ram Vilash! Do whatever you can. Use all your resources and connections. Provide all the infrastructure facilities of education what the children of Bihar require at par with the southern states.
I wish some readers of this write-up came out with some answers that they think would be reasonable for so high a position of Bihar in my ranking based on Goggle.
- Indra
Category: Employment/Education |
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