This Mint editorial features Vivek Dehejia and Praveen Chakravarty's research on regional divergence. Excerpts:

"This is not just a snapshot in time. Conventional economic theory dictates that as aggregate prosperity grows, the states should converge economically. This is emphatically not the case in India. In their 2005 paper, Spatial Inequality in Rural India: Do Initial Conditions Matter?, Puja Vasudeva Dutta and Hari K. Nagarajan had found that almost the entire rise in aggregate inequality between 1981-82 and 1998-99 was due to spatial inequality. And in 2016, Vivek Dehejia and Praveen Chakravarty showed that the difference in per capita income between the leading large states and the laggards had increased sharply post-1991. Unsurprisingly, western coastal states made up the former group while eastern coastal groups—with the exception of Tamil Nadu—made up the latter."

Read the full article here.