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West Bengal is unique among the states of India in having district-wise estimates of domestic product...available from 1980-81 onwards; however, frequent changes of base and in methodology mean that a continuous time series cannot be derived which would provide some indication of district-wise growth...
However, assessments at any one point in time are possible...on the per capita income in 2000-01 (at current prices) and the relative ranking of districts then as well as twenty years earlier.
It is clear that per capita income in Calcutta is substantially above that in all other districts...This disparity has increased over time, despite the pattern of growth which has emphasized agricultural output expansion by small cultivators and rural industrialisation...This does not mean that per capita income in other districts has come down; on the contrary, it has increased by nearly 4 per cent...But the increase in per capita incomes in Calcutta has been even more rapid, widening the gaps with all other districts.
While the richest (Calcutta and Darjeeling) have retained the highest positions among districts, there has been a lot of change in the middle and lower ranks...For example, there has been a significant improvement in the relative positions of Jalpaiguri, Nadia and Malda, and to a lesser extent of Bankura and Midnapur. By contrast, there has been significant deterioration in rank for Birbhum and Purulia, and also for both the 24 Parganas...
It is true that per capita district domestic product...is not strongly correlated with per capita consumption; some of the richer districts like Darjeeling and Jalpaiguri show relatively lower average consumption expenditure, while some poorer districts in DDP terms such as Koch Behar, Haora or North 24 Parganas show relatively higher per capita consumption…
In WB, rural per capita consumption is less unequal across districts than aggregate output. Haora, the district with the highest rural average consumption, shows per capita consumption to be more than twice that of the lowest (Purulia), while in per capita DDP terms, the difference between highest and lowest districts is nearly three times.
The third feature is that there are very sharp urban-rural differences in average consumption across most districts, with urban per capita consumption being much higher, and typically more than one and a half times than rural average consumption. Purulia, South 24 Parganas and Dinajpur show the highest rates of rural-urban inequality in consumption. Jalpaiguri is an exception, in that per capita consumption seems to be both relatively low and evenly spread across rural and urban areas...Jalpaiguri also shows relatively high rates of poverty in both rural and urban areas.
The wide disparity of terms of the incidence of poverty is the fourth important feature. Poverty is lowest in the Calcutta metropolitan area and its surroundings, to the extent that urban poverty appears to be negligible in Haora and even rural poverty is very low in this district.
The district of North 24 Parganas also shows relatively low poverty...There are some districts with very high poverty...in fact, the rural poverty figures for Purulia and Bankura are...alarming. Other districts with high rural poverty are Birbhum, Murshidabad and Jalpaiguri.
It is noteworthy that Jalpaiguri and Murshidabad are the only districts where the urban poverty rate is higher than the rural rate. In fact urban poverty in Jalpaiguri is extremely high, at more than 61 per cent, while Bankura and Murshidabad also have urban poverty rates of around 50 per cent. Surprisingly, Malda shows a very low incidence of urban poverty.