There is something uniquely wrong culturally in those states, and it permeates all the way down to the lowest levels. That something is a rampant culture of corruption and oppression of minorities and lower caste peoples. In some states, there's only corruption and dishonesty in the upper levels (or little of it like Kerala and HP). In most states, there's corruption in the upper and middle levels. But in the BIMARU belt and Karnataka, it's practically every where. Every one is looking to scam and cheat you regardless of where you are. Karnataka was "saved" thanks to the IT boom, but without that happening, it would have remained an extremely corrupt mining state. But for the others, it's telling when you get in a lot more Central funding and still have nothing to show for it.
IMO, most of those states should be split for good reason, to make administration easier and more easy to monitor. UP should be 3 states, Rajasthan should be 2, MP should be 2. Even worse, looking at the split away states such as Uttarakhand, Chhattisgarh or Jharkhand, they're all now currently better run than their parent states.
Yeah, 1000 years of being the easiest target of foreign raids erodes all culture down to the bone.
I don't think it has much to do with minority oppression. If anything, these states have been run through minority favored govts for a long time. SP favored the Muslims, BSP favored lower castes, Lalu favored the OBCs, and Nitish a combination of them all.
> IMO, most of those states should be split for good reason, to make administration easier and more easy to monitor. UP should be 3 states, Rajasthan should be 2, MP should be 2
Whole heartedly agreed, 50 million is near the upper bound of how many people can be sanely governed by a single entity.
Punjab and Haryana are the gateway for any foreign invasions, yet while corrupt, they don't have anywhere close to the corruption that those states have. Besides, Malwa (where MP is) was often not conquered soon enough because of the hilly Vindhyas and the presence of powerful ruling states in that region. So I don't buy the foreign invasion argument.
I didn't say that the corrupt culture has much to do with the oppression of minorities. By that factor, Gujarat should have been doing severely poorly. But oppressing minorities seems to be something all of these states tend to want to do some time or the other. That's just something that's bad for business and economic growth, but still doesn't explain why these states are uniformly corrupt, even worse so than poorer states like Sikkim or Odisha.
IMO, most of those states should be split for good reason, to make administration easier and more easy to monitor. UP should be 3 states, Rajasthan should be 2, MP should be 2. Even worse, looking at the split away states such as Uttarakhand, Chhattisgarh or Jharkhand, they're all now currently better run than their parent states.