Regional disparities in social development: A case of selected districts in Kerala, India.

Regional disparities are prevalent in almost all nations globally irrespective of whether being developed, developing, or under-developed. With the recent shift of focus towards human development, the presence of inequalities in social development is one of the major issues faced by developing nations and hence becomes the underlying theme of this paper. It attempted to explore the spatial inequalities in the social development of a selected region within and representing Kerala state, India. This research attempted to address the following question: whether a state which has been performing socially well has inequalities present among its regions. A set of relevant variables were shortlisted from a holistic literature review and further screened using various criteria followed by an expert opinion survey. Subsequently, spatial analysis of regional disparities was conducted in two stages. Firstly, a composite index to measure the development of settlements was constructed by adopting the principal component analysis approach. Secondly, the settlements were grouped into three homogenous clusters by k-means cluster analysis and named accordingly. The results revealed that, in terms of reduced inequalities, the settlements performed well in social infrastructure development followed by road infrastructure. At the same time, the performance of the settlements in social characteristics was poor. Significant variations were also found in employment and housing infrastructure development. While the composite index helped compare the development status of settlements, the classification of settlements aided in identifying regions and sectors that were backward in terms of social development. Accordingly, solutions and strategies were proposed for balanced regional development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]