Interactive scatter plot of per-capita income against literacy and infant mortality for thirteen Indian states, with toggles to switch outcome metric and income measure.
Income vs outcomes — thirteen states on one canvas
Per-capita income against literacy and child survival, with remittance toggle
Plotted on the same canvas, the income–outcome relationship is messier than a single trend line. A southern cluster (Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka) plus Maharashtra delivers strong outcomes for their income tier. A low-income cluster (Bihar, UP, MP, Odisha) anchors the bottom. Two states sit clearly off-trend in the high-income, weak-outcome corner: Gujarat and Haryana — wealthier than Maharashtra and on par with Karnataka on income, but substantially behind on literacy and child survival. Kerala punches above its NSDP on outcomes; once Keralites' overseas earnings are added back, it lifts on the income measure too. The Gujarat–Haryana outlier position holds in every combination of the toggles.
IMR × NSDP + remittances. Kerala alone in the top-right — child-survival edge that predates the Gulf wave. The wealthy outliers (Haryana IMR 26, Gujarat IMR 20) sit closer to MP and UP (both 37) on the IMR scale than to Karnataka or Maharashtra (both 14). Bihar (IMR 23) is roughly even with Gujarat despite five times less income per head. Odisha at IMR 30 lags its income tier (88.5%, just below national average). Income clearly doesn't determine outcome.
Reading the chart. Each dot is a state. Horizontal position is per-capita income as a percentage of the all-India average — further right means richer. Vertical position is the outcome metric — higher up always means better outcomes (the IMR axis is inverted so that lower mortality reads as "up"). The vertical dashed line marks the national income average; the horizontal dashed line marks the all-India outcome value for context.
Data points. Income is per-capita NSDP for 2023-24, sourced from EAC-PM Working Paper 31/2024. The "+ Remittances" view adds an estimated household remittance income — RBI 6th Remittances Survey 2023-24 state shares × total inflow ÷ state population. For states outside the survey's named top five (Gujarat, Punjab, Haryana, AP, WB, Bihar), the remittance share is approximated from EPW commentary on the survey; values are marked with "≈" in the takeaways. Literacy is the 2011 Census; infant mortality is the 2023 SRS. Andhra Pradesh's 2011 literacy figure is for the combined state (Telangana was created in 2014). The current asset is a snapshot — for the time-series version, see the companion piece on income without broad outcomes.
On remittances and human capital. A common framing treats Kerala's outcomes as remittance-dependent — as though Gulf money explains the development. The chronology rejects that: Kerala's literacy in 1951 (47%) was already two-and-a-half times India's, and infant mortality was at half the national rate by 1971 — both well before the Gulf migration wave. The human capital came first; the migration came second, because Keralites had the education and health to command premium wages abroad.
The same logic generalises. White-collar diaspora professionals — the engineers, doctors and IT workers that Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka send in large numbers to the US, UK and Singapore — remit on the same principle as Kerala's earlier Gulf migrants: education built at home, wages earned abroad, money flowing to households here. Even the Global Capability Centres in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai and Pune are a kind of remittance-in-place — the worker is physically in India but the salary comes from a foreign employer paying for skills India built.
What unifies these flows is the global market pricing Indian human capital. States that built that capital collect the dividend, in cash sent home or in salaries paid by foreign employers. States that didn't, don't. Reading any of these flows as a "prop" for the underlying outcomes inverts the causality — not just for Kerala.