Well? How is that for a statistic to think about?

If I were prime minister for a day, I would scrap all anti-poverty programmes and start sending out money orders of Rs 8,000 each but, alas, it’s not that easy. Without the state governments improving their standards of governance, nothing can happen.

The tragedy of Uttar Pradesh is that not only have living conditions not improved but in many ways they have gotten worse. In the old days, when I went to school in Uttar Pradesh, it was, if not rich, at least beautiful. Its rivers were clean, its towns full of old world charm, its air fresh and its villages attractive in a primitive sort of way.

All of these things have deteriorated before our eyes in the past two decades and the deterioration can be traced to almost the exact moment when Ayodhya became the state’s main political issue. While the Congress and BJP played the politics of temple and mosque, local political parties woke up to the simple equations of caste. And it has been downhill since.

Can things improve? Easily. All the state needs is one chief minister who has the determination to change the political agenda. One chief minister who is not tainted by the rotten politics of the past 20 years. Unfortunately for Uttar Pradesh, such a chief minister is not going to become available as a result of this election. We will have to wait for the next one and this is a big, big problem because India cannot go forward if a state as large and important as Uttar Pradesh continues to lag behind.