Towards Building A District Development Model For India Using Census Data

Models for socio-economic development are useful for planners to build appropriate policies. Such models are ideally constructed based on empirical data, and we take up the problem of working towards a district development model for India by using two waves of census data. India has almost six hundred districts, diverse in terms of their social and economic development, and hence presents a unique natural experiment to understand how social and economic factors interplay with one another. In this paper, we present some interesting observations we are able to make from the analysis of census data from the years 2001 and 2011, and also raise some questions calling for the need for additional ethnographic and other surveys to be able to understand the underlying mechanisms that would have led to the observed patterns.