Inter- District Disparity in Health Care Facility and Education: A Case of Uttar Pradesh

Abstract

Economic and Human development in any society are prerequisites for a better quality of human life. The present paper attempts to measure inter-district disparity in education and health attainment in UP at two time periods 1990-91 and 2007-08. It uses Maher’s methodology (subsequently used by a number of others) to standardise 8 indicators for the health attainment and 13 for educational attainment and then applies principal component analysis to compute the composite indices. The results show that apart from existence of wide disparity there are sufficient proof to say that there are regions/districts that have done well in educational attainment but are poorly placed in terms of health attainment and vice-versa. The paper offers some suggestions to reduce the glaring disparity.

Keywords: Disparity, health and education, Composite Indices, district-level,.