2017 Uttar Pradesh Assembly Elections - Status Report of the State

With 200 million people, UP is the most populous State in India, and if it were a separate country, it would rank, globally, fifth in population.

Most believe that the leadership displayed by the educated and urbane Akhilesh Yadav is a clear departure from the caste-based poverty-politics so common in the Indo-Gangetic plain. Akhilesh’s development-centricity is believed to have endeared him to the masses so much so that even as an incumbent he stands a fair chance to win a second term.

However, statistics show that the performance of the 43-year-old chief minister over the past five years is not so great. Numbers suggest that nothing has changed in UPsince the Yadav scion took over the reins in March 2012

Look at it from any parameter — crime, industry, agriculture, fiscal management: the State still stands where it stood in 2012. For example, UP continues to be the most crime-ridden region in the country

Every type of criminal activity — rape, kidnapping, robbery, riot, arson — is on the rise in UP, leading to the inevitable conclusion that the government has not been able to get a grip over crime. Nor is it merely a function of population — UP does not have more crime only because it has more people. The crime rate, defined as instances of crime per one lakh population, has also gone up — from 96.4 in 2012 to 112.1 in 2015.

For sure, UP is not the only State where crime has gone up. But it’s where a type of crime is either the highest in the country, or has risen the fastest over five years. For example, the number of kidnapping cases rose steeply in Maharashtra, from 1,583 in 2012 to 8,255 in 2015, to rank second on this count, but the State is far below UP’s 11,999 cases.

Rape cases in Madhya Pradesh (4,391), Maharashtra (4,144) and Rajasthan (3,644) were higher than in UP in 2015, but Akhilesh’s State has seen the second highest rise, next only to Gujarat (473 to 2,108, in 2012-2015).

If that’s the crime scene, things aren’t rosier in economic growth. UP’s rank, as second last, after Bihar, has not improved at all between 2011-12 and 2015-16, in terms of nominal net per capita income.

In the case of UP, it rose from ₹32,002 to ₹48,520, or 52 per cent. Even Bihar grew 57 per cent to ₹34,168. To put this in perspective, other States grew much faster — Karnataka 65 per cent, MP 69 per cent. States that grew slower than UP (AP 47 per cent, Odisha 42 per cent) did so on much higher base.