Abstract
India has had a glorious past. Our cultural heritage is comparable to that of China or Egypt. We had great kings
and kingdoms. Half of the major world religions had their origin in India. We and produced great thinkers and
philosophers who contributed to several branches of knowledge. But most of our history before 1500 AD is in
oral traditions. Indians, by and large, were not good at record keeping. This is especially true about hard facts
and data relating to various aspects of life. Even for the period 1500 to 1750 AD data are rudimentary. The
historical trends discussed in this section, by and large, are based on Cambridge Economic History of India edited by Dharma Kumar with editorial assistance by Meghnad Desai and Tapan Raychaudhuri and Irfan Habib
Keywords: Digital economy, Goods and Services Tax, Uniform Tax Rate, and Retailer.
References
The Cambridge Economic History of India, Volume I and II. General Editors: Dharma Kumar and Tapan Ray Chaudhuri, Orient Longman,Third Edition, 1991.
See for detail: S. Sivasubramanian: The National Income of India in the Twentieth Century, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2000.
These are (i) convergence of incomes across Indian States – A Divergent View by M.G. Rao, R.T. Shand and K.P. Kalirajan, (ii) Trends in Inter-State Inequalities of Income in India by Nirupam Bajpai and Jeffery D. Sachs, and (iii) Widening Inter-State Economic and Social Disparities in India by Fahrettin Yagci.The first study was published in EPW, March 27, 1999. The other two were presented in a seminar organized jointly by the World Bank and the Institute of Social and Economic Change at Bangalore in May, 1999.
With the recent reorganization of the States, there are a total of 28 States, besides 7 Union Territories in the Indian Union now. In the absence of the relevant data, for the purpose of the present study, we consider the undivided States of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh.
See for detail: Provisional Population Totals – Paper One of Census of India 2001, Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India, New Delhi.