Patterns of Socio-economic Deprivation and its Impact on Quality of Life: Case of a Less Developed Region in West Bengal, India

In the current context of regional planning, the issue of socioeconomic deprivation and its impact on quality of life is becoming highly significant. Though several regions in cities and their fringe areas are continuously developing, but the community development blocks of various sub regions in them exhibit a fairly evident pattern of dichotomy and duality in development. Consequently, the sub regions become more socio-economically susceptible and more prone to vulnerability compared to the cities having a higher level of preparedness in development. The key reason is the unequal distribution of national assets and resources across the systems of sub regions. Hence, there is a need to evaluate the degree of susceptibility in the different sub regions. The susceptibility in the process of development can be spatially explained by studying the patterns of deprivation in the sub regions. Additionally there is an observation on quality of life in terms of poor physical infrastructure and housing conditions, which has bearing with susceptibility. The present paper tries to identify the patterns of deprivation and its impact on quality of life from the two observations. The study has been performed based on the performances of fifteen socio-economic growth indicators, broadly categorized as health, education and economic indicators following Human Development Index (HDI) guidelines. The patterns of deprivation of a sub region have been identified by calculating the distribution of deprivation index across the region. Finally, the paper has tried to understand the nature of relationship between deprivation index and quality of life indicators. There is a specific case of Malda, a comparatively less developed region of West Bengal which has been selected as the case study to best forward the concerns of the paper.