Recent Trends in Regionalism: Economic Imbalances and Political Dynamics

Why do prosperous farmers in one district and struggling labourers a few hundred kilometres away end up demanding completely different things from the same government? The answer lies in how unevenly economic growth has spread across the country. Regionalism is not merely a clash of languages or cultures. In recent decades, its sharpest edge has been economic, fuelled by the simple grievance that some regions are racing ahead while others are left waiting. Understanding this economic dimension is essential to making sense of the political demands, development boards, and resource battles that dominate state politics today.

Why economic imbalance feeds regionalism 🔗

Regionalism, at its core, is the assertion of a region’s interests, often born from a sense of being treated unfairly. While historical isolation and cultural distinctiveness matter, the most persistent driver in recent decades has been uneven economic development. When one region consistently receives more investment, better infrastructure, and greater attention while another is neglected despite being rich in resources, resentment builds. Scholars often describe this through the lens of internal colonialism, where a dominant “core” region effectively exploits the “periphery” within the same nation.

The numbers make the imbalance concrete. A working paper by the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister found that Delhi’s per capita income reached about 250 percent of the national average, while West Bengal, once the third-richest region in the early 1960s, slid to roughly 84 percent of the national average. When gaps this wide harden over decades, they stop being just economic statistics. They become political fault lines.

The core-periphery divide 🔗

Industrially advanced regions attract more capital, skilled workers, and government projects, creating a cycle where the rich get richer. Peripheral regions, often dependent on agriculture or burdened by difficult terrain, fall further behind. The dominance of southern and western states illustrates this. Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu together contributed over 30 percent of national GDP in 2023-24, while several eastern states saw their relative share shrink. This is exactly the kind of imbalance that turns into demands for greater autonomy and a larger share of resources.

The Green Revolution and the rise of regional rural elites 🔗

One of the clearest turning points in recent regionalism was the Green Revolution of the late 1960s. Launched to solve a severe food crisis, it introduced high-yielding variety seeds, chemical fertilisers, expanded irrigation, and mechanisation. The strategy worked spectacularly for food security but was deliberately concentrated in a few favourable areas. The benefits flowed mainly to Punjab, Haryana, and western Uttar Pradesh for wheat, with parts of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu gaining in rice.

This selective success created a new social group: a class of prosperous, commercially oriented farmers who could afford the new inputs. As one analysis notes, the Green Revolution elevated the status of progressive farmers and created a new class of rural elites. These wealthier cultivators did not just gain economically. They translated their wealth into political clout, organising to defend crop prices, subsidies, and irrigation access. Regional rural elites became a powerful constituency that state and national politics could no longer ignore.

Accentuating inter-regional tension 🔗

The flip side was painful for those left out. Eastern states such as Bihar, Odisha, Assam, and West Bengal, along with tribal and hilly belts, missed the first Green Revolution due to lack of irrigation and infrastructure, even though many had higher rural poverty. The technology touched only a fraction of the cropped area, leaving roughly 60 percent of farmland largely untouched. The result was a sharpening of inter-regional disparities: high-yield zones pulled ahead in incomes and investment, while neglected zones fell further behind and watched the gap widen year after year.

This was not only a regional problem but also a class one. Within the favoured states themselves, large landowners benefited disproportionately while small and marginal farmers, unable to afford the new inputs, often slipped into landlessness and rural indebtedness. In Punjab and Haryana, this concentration of gains among large farmers sharpened tensions between landed groups and landless labourers, frequently along caste lines.

Peripheral regions and the demand for special measures 🔗

When a region feels both economically neglected and politically sidelined, the natural response is to demand corrective action. The pattern is consistent across the country. The Telangana region, for instance, long felt economically and politically marginalised by the more developed coastal Andhra region within the combined Andhra Pradesh, and that grievance over unequal distribution of resources and political power eventually drove the demand for a separate state.

These demands typically follow a recognisable sequence. First comes the perception of neglect, then the articulation of a distinct regional identity, and finally a political demand for special development measures. These could be special funding packages, a separate development authority, or in the strongest cases, an entirely new state. Sub-regional movements in Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, and Uttarakhand all grew from a similar sense that the larger state they belonged to was diverting resources elsewhere.

Development boards as a constitutional response 🔗

Recognising this danger early, the Constitution built in a mechanism to address regional imbalance within states. Article 371 empowers the President to direct the Governors of Maharashtra and Gujarat to establish separate development boards for specific backward regions. This provision was inserted by the Constitution (Seventh Amendment) Act, 1956, precisely because there were sharp development gaps among regions like Vidarbha, Marathwada, Saurashtra, and Kutch when the old Bombay State was being reorganised.

Acting on this provision, three development boards for Vidarbha, Marathwada, and the rest of Maharashtra were constituted by the Governor on 25 June 1994, with parallel boards for Saurashtra and Kutch in Gujarat. Their job is to ensure the equitable allocation of funds for development, recommend measures to overcome regional backwardness, and submit annual reports to the State Legislative Assembly. The persistence of the gaps these boards were meant to close is striking. Data compiled for the Marathwada Statutory Development Board showed that the “rest of Maharashtra” region accounted for around 90 percent of the state’s foreign direct investment, leaving Vidarbha and Marathwada far behind.

Neo-liberal reforms and the widening gap 🔗

If the Green Revolution planted the seeds of recent regionalism, the economic reforms of 1991 watered them. Facing a severe balance of payments crisis, the government under P.V. Narasimha Rao and Finance Minister Manmohan Singh launched the LPG reforms: liberalisation, privatisation, and globalisation. The state stepped back, industrial licensing was dismantled, and private and foreign investment was welcomed.

The catch was that this new market competition was not played on a level field. Investment naturally flowed to states that already had better infrastructure, more educated workforces, and stronger institutions, largely in western and southern India. States like Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Maharashtra attracted significant investment while eastern states such as Bihar lagged behind, deepening the very disparities the country had been trying to reduce.

From economic grievance to electoral platform 🔗

This is where economics and politics fuse most clearly. As competition for investment widened the gap between rich and poor regions, the demand for equitable resource allocation became more than an economic argument. It turned into a powerful electoral platform for regional parties, who could mobilise voters around the grievance of being left behind. The combination of economic liberalisation and political decentralisation reshaped the relationship between the central government and the states, giving regional actors both fresh complaints and greater bargaining power.

Successive Five-Year Plans tried to respond. Post-reform plans increasingly adopted a regional approach rather than a purely sectoral one, attempting to reduce disparities between states and tie development to governance quality. Yet the structural pull of capital towards already-advantaged regions has proven hard to counter, which is why economic regionalism remains so politically potent.

Tying the threads together 🔗

The recent growth of regionalism is best understood as a chain reaction. Uneven planning and the selective spread of the Green Revolution created prosperous regional elites in some areas and a deep sense of neglect in others. Peripheral regions responded with demands for special treatment, prompting constitutional tools like development boards. Then the neo-liberal turn of the 1990s widened the gap further by rewarding regions that were already ahead. At each stage, an economic imbalance translated into a political demand, which is why regional parties and resource disputes have become permanent features of the landscape.

What do you think? Should constitutional mechanisms like development boards be strengthened and extended to more backward regions, or do they merely treat the symptoms while ignoring the deeper structural pull of capital toward already-developed areas? And is some degree of regional imbalance an unavoidable cost of rapid national growth, or a failure of planning that can still be corrected?

References

1. https://sociology.institute/india-democracy-development/understanding-region-regionalism-india/
2. https://visionias.in/current-affairs/monthly-magazine/2024-10-17/economics-(indian-economy)/regional-disparity-in-development
3. https://blog.lukmaanias.com/2025/05/19/green-revolution-in-india-2/
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6. https://www.nextias.com/blog/regionalism-in-india/
7. https://www.constitutionofindia.net/articles/article-371-special-provision-with-respect-to-the-states-of-maharashtra-and-gujarat/
8. https://www.msdb.gov.in/newsite/article.html
9. https://rajbhavan-maharashtra.gov.in/en/division/development-board-branch/
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathwada_Statutory_Development_Board
11. https://sociology.institute/india-democracy-development/political-economy-regionalism-india-transition/
12. https://csr.education/development-in-india/1991-economic-crisis-india-liberalisation-impacts-outcomes/
13. https://csr.education/development-in-india/post-1991-india-economic-plans-liberalization/