An excerpt from ‘Heartland Rising: The Making of Majoritarian India’

It is relevant that Uttar Pradesh and Bihar have consistently been privileged, that their chronic failure to develop is concealed under a carapace of opacity, hiding important aspects of State development in order to enhance the weightage it would receive under the Finance Commission. The Union government has deliberately manipulated and diluted the data for this purpose. To take one example, there is the matter of literacy rates. In Uttar Pradesh, the literacy rate appears to have increased substantially from 1951 to 2011, from around 12 per cent to 68 per cent. However, one must be wary of such figures, as the definition India employs to define a literate person is an outlier. To be considered literate in India, one only has to be able to read and write their own name; this requires a very limited notion of the alphabet.