“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale/her infinite variety” wrote Shakespeare in praise of great feminine beauty. India's variety in many different forms has also been a source of its strength, perhaps even beauty, and yet some of our regional variations are reflections of huge disparities in basic living conditions that are reasons for shame rather than pride.

The average figures for India as a whole can, thus, be extremely deceptive as a guide to the lives of the people of India — a great many people in some parts of the country do dramatically worse than that. These disparities are not getting smaller, and often enough, those states that are ahead are getting further ahead while the states down below lag more and more behind. For example, those states that were already ahead in education, health care and other features of human development have been able to, by and large, make much fuller use of the opportunities offered by economic reform, and this has helped them to increase their incomes as well as allowed them the means of going further forward, compared with those left even more firmly at the rear. There are reasons to be concerned about this problem of divided fortunes and reasons too for looking for ways and means of reducing regional disparities through enhancing the opportunities that the more problematic regions have.