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Regional disparities in social development: A case of selected districts in Kerala, India

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Abstract

Regional disparities are prevalent in almost all nations globally irrespective of whether being developed, developing, or under-developed. With the recent shift of focus towards human development, the presence of inequalities in social development is one of the major issues faced by developing nations and hence becomes the underlying theme of this paper. It attempted to explore the spatial inequalities in the social development of a selected region within and representing Kerala state, India. This research attempted to address the following question: whether a state which has been performing socially well has inequalities present among its regions. A set of relevant variables were shortlisted from a holistic literature review and further screened using various criteria followed by an expert opinion survey. Subsequently, spatial analysis of regional disparities was conducted in two stages. Firstly, a composite index to measure the development of settlements was constructed by adopting the principal component analysis approach. Secondly, the settlements were grouped into three homogenous clusters by k-means cluster analysis and named accordingly. The results revealed that, in terms of reduced inequalities, the settlements performed well in social infrastructure development followed by road infrastructure. At the same time, the performance of the settlements in social characteristics was poor. Significant variations were also found in employment and housing infrastructure development. While the composite index helped compare the development status of settlements, the classification of settlements aided in identifying regions and sectors that were backward in terms of social development. Accordingly, solutions and strategies were proposed for balanced regional development.

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Fig. 1

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Notes

  1. India is a union of states with a federal, parliamentary governance system. There are 28 states and nine union territories (UTs), which are further divided into districts.

  2. India’s administrative set-up adopts a decentralised system comprising the country at the apex, followed by the state and the local self-government. Each state comprises districts, and each district is further divided into urban local bodies named Municipal Corporations or Municipalities and rural local bodies named Grama Panchayats.

  3. The hotspot analysis using univariate LISA identified significant clusters and outliers. There are four types of clusters based on the spatial association: high-high, low-low, low–high, and high-low. The first two associations indicate clustering of similar values, and the latter two are spatial outliers where there is a clustering of dissimilar values.

  4. Internal validation measures assess the quality of clustering. These measures reflect the compactness (Dunn Index), connectedness (Connectivity) and separation of the clusters (Silhouette width).

  5. Stability measures validate the clusters by comparing the results of clustering based on full data with one column removed. These measures include Average Distance (AD), Average proportion of non-overlap (APN), Average Distance between Means (ADM) and Figure of Merit (FOM).

  6. The Panchayat Raj system adopted in India for decentralised governance follows a three-tier system from village-level (Gram Panchayat) to block-level (Taluka/Block Panchayat) and then to district-level (Zilla Panchayat).

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the Directors and Faculty of Centre for Socio Economic and Environmental Studies (CSES), Kochi, Kerala and Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala for their valuable inputs. The authors also wish to thank the Faculty of the Department of Architecture and Planning, National Institute of Technology Calicut, Kerala for their valuable suggestions and inputs with a special mention of the M.Plan Thesis (2015-17) Committee.

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  1. Department of Architecture and Planning, National Institute of Technology Calicut, NIT Campus P.O, Kozhikode, 673601, Kerala, India

    Fathim Rashna Kallingal & C. Mohammed Firoz

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  1. Fathim Rashna Kallingal
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by [FRK]. The supervision was done by [MFC] The first draft of the manuscript was written by [FRK] and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Fathim Rashna Kallingal.

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The datasets analysed during the current study are available in the CENSUS OF INDIA repository, https://censusindia.gov.in/DigitalLibrary/archive_home.aspx

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Kallingal, F.R., Mohammed Firoz, C. Regional disparities in social development: A case of selected districts in Kerala, India. GeoJournal 88, 161–188 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-022-10592-w

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