Maharashtra Development Report

Report with reference to the state of Maharashtra, India.

The present Maharashtra Human Development Report (MHDR) 2012 keeps the spirit of the Eleventh and Twelfth Five Year Plans of ‘faster, sustainable and more inclusive growth’ at the core of its analysis. MHDR 2002 was the state’s first effort in focusing on the prevailing human development scenario in the spheres of growth, poverty, equity, education, health and nutrition. Since then the state has come a long way in the last decade, achieving near-complete enrolments at the primary school level, a wide coverage of health infrastructure and initiation of new incentives, to name a few. The 2012 Report goes beyond being just a situation-analysis of the current human development scenario to a more analytical exercise in facilitating a deeper understanding of what and where the inequalities are, how capabilities can be enhanced, what has been the progress, where the shortfalls are and where the thrust of efforts to promote human development should be. Recognizing the centrality of inclusive growth processes to human development, the need to study human development outcomes disaggregated by gender, rural–urban, regional and social groups is the focal point of this Report. The outcome would be the identification of specific human development goals, evidence-based policy recommendations and directions to how those excluded from the growth and human development processes can be included to reap the benefits of the same.

Recent surveys on urban agglomerations reveal that more than half the world's population currently lives in cities. It is also estimated that by the year 2030, developing countries will account for 80 per cent of the world's urban population. In India, over 61 million people are urban slum dwellers, nearly 22 per cent of the urban population. As Indian cities continue to grow and expand, they face the challenges of providing infrastructure, housing, water, sanitation, healthcare and education to their citizens. Densely populated, the massive urban conglomerate spread across the Mumbai Metropolitan Region is the largest urban conglomerate in India. Mumbai personifies the paradox of extreme wealth and extreme poverty living side by side. It, more than any other Indian city, is a city in transition, looking to the future, attempting to modernize. However, its attempt at modernization must include efforts to improve the quality of life of all its citizens. This report is a step in that direction. It is the first, global city-level human development report that analyses in-depth various issues such as population, education, slums, gender, health, among others, that will aid the city's progress in future. Authored by the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai, this comprehensive report was prepared under the National Strategy for Urban Poor Project, a joint project of the Government of India and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). It will be of interest to administrators and policymakers, civil society organizations, urban planners and researchers, university and institutional libraries, as well as various government ministries and departments, and national and international agencies.

Throughout the 20th century, electricity was considered to be the primary vehicle of modernity, as well as its quintessential symbol. In India, electrification was central to how early nationalists and planners conceptualized Indian development, and huge sums were spent on the project from then until now. Yet despite all this, sixty-five years after independence nearly 400 million Indians have no access to electricity. Electrifying India explores the political and historical puzzle of uneven development in India's vital electricity sector. In some states, nearly all citizens have access to electricity, while in others fewer than half of households have reliable electricity. To help explain this variation, this book offers both a regional and a historical perspective on the politics of electrification of India as it unfolded in New Delhi and three Indian states: Maharashtra, Odisha, and Andhra Pradesh. In those parts of the countryside that were successfully electrified in the decades after independence, the gains were due to neither nationalist idealism nor merely technocratic plans, but rather to the rising political influence and pressure of rural constituencies. In looking at variation in how public utilities expanded over a long period of time, this book argues that the earlier period of an advancing state apparatus from the 1950s to the 1980s conditioned in important ways the manner of the state's retreat during market reforms from the 1990s onward.