At an impressive growth rate of 14.7 percent in 2015-16, Jammu and Kashmir ranked 2nd in the latest India Today annual ‘State of the States’ ranking. The state has also been positioned itself at 11th in the overall ranking of large states.J&K has achieved 2nd ranking in other two key areas including Education and Environment.Launched in 2003, this annual exercise by India Today is based on objective data sourced from government and other authentic sources to gauge the performance of Indian states across various parameters such as economy, health, agriculture, education and infrastructure.Regarded as the gold standard in measuring the socio-economic performance of the states, the study reveals that Arunachal Pradesh has topped the growth ranking as ‘Fast and Furious’ marking the highest growth rate in the nation in 2015-16 at 16.5% followed by J&K at 14.7%, with Goa, Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh also making to the top five states.Achieving significant milestones in implementation of various developmental initiatives, Jammu and Kashmir has marked positive performance in this comparative study and has received accolades and recognition in various fields including education, environment & cleanliness, inclusive development besides cutting into top 10 states in health, law & order, economy and infrastructure.
As a result of focussed attention by the government to education sector both in qualitative and in quantitative terms, Jammu and Kashmir has been ranked 2nd among all the large states based on improvement in parameters including average student to classroom ratio, transition rate from primary to upper primary, number of girls enrolled in primary, pupil teacher ratio, lesser dropout rate, number of schools and colleges per lakh population.The study also makes the way for J&K to achieve the 2nd ranking in environment and cleanliness following the state of Telangana and 4th ranking in inclusive development category. J&K also received top accolades for marking huge improvement in environment and cleanliness in the large states category between 2010-11 and 15-16.The state has been ranked 7th in the public health, 6th in law & order and 10th in both economy and infrastructure.With accruing 9th position among the top states, with the lowest percentage of population below the poverty line, J&K has managed to be counted as one of the prosperous states in the nation. Currently state’s 10.4% population is below poverty line as compared to the 5.1% of Goa, 7.1% of Kerala and 8.2% of Sikkim which have topped this category.