Inter-State Disparities in Higher Education: Affecting Economic Development in India

The pivotal role of human resources is now universally recognized in economic growth. As modern education in India has been in vogue for more than two centuries, it may be surmised that the disparities in education might have been eliminated, by and large, during this long period. However, the fact remains that the differences of natural resource endowment, infrastructural regional inequalities, and paucity of financial resources led to the adoption of selectivity in regional development in India, which resulted in the disparities of social and economic development among the states. Research has been done to understand the intertemporal differential development of the states. This research paper is based on secondary data, supplemented by state wise data of population and gross state domestic product. The study used both econometric and statistical tools for the analysis of data. The methods and models used in the study ranged from simple tools of descriptive statistics like mean, median, variance, and coefficients of skewness and kurtosis. The data was also subjected to more rigorous two-factor ANOVA without replication to supplement the application of descriptive statistics. A very high degree of intertemporal and interspatial disparities was highlighted by these results. Socioeconomic inequalities emerged from the uneven distribution, and hence, a high degree of spatial concentration of population and population distribution among the Indian states was also examined.