Shedding Light on Regional Growth and Convergence in India

One of the well documented facts about India's rapid growth since 1991 has been the accompanying unequal sub-national experiences. In this paper, using unsaturated night-light data for 1996-2010, we investigate patterns of growth at the district level. We find evidence of absolute convergence. Disaggregating along rural and urban dimensions, we also show that this is mainly due to faster growth in rural areas. Further, districts that have grown faster are ones that are geographically disadvantaged - further away from the coast, with lower agricultural suitability of land, and more rugged terrains. The convergence results are also robust to a few of the major policy initiatives that overlapped during this time.