The irony was unescapable. The Samajwadi Party’s luxury bus turned ‘development chariot’ (Vikas Rath) had to stall on Lohia Path, the Lucknow road named after the party’s ideological icon and father of the socialist movement Ram Manohar Lohia. The chariot, a red Mercedes Benz 10-wheeler showed off chief minister Akhilesh Yadav riding a bicycle, the party’s symbol, on one side and his father Mulayam Singh Yadav sharing space with Lohia and Janeshwar Mishra, co-founder of the party, on the other.Slick graphics of lush farms, rising factories, a metro rail and black-topped highways tried to draw a hieroglyphical message about the Akhilesh government’s credentials in achieving the dream state. Yet, its stalling was somehow symbolic of UP’s real state of affairs—broken from the inside.As he heads to polls early next year, Akhilesh Yadav has been rushing to complete marquee infrastructure projects such as a metro rail in Lucknow and a 300-kilometre access-controlled expressway from the state capital to Agra. Yadav recently announced 24-hour power supply to all major cities and 20-hour and 18-hour electricity for towns and villages respectively. In the past couple of years, the Akhilesh government has pushed hard to create infrastructure and put together a slew of welfare measures like free laptops for students and insurance for farmers. But it would take much more than gifting gadgets and announcing noble intentions to dismantle the infamous superstructure of crime, corruption and inefficiency, much of it a legacy of the cynical politics of the state, including the chief minister’s own Samajwadi Party “Infrastructure is a pre-condition but not the sufficient condition for economic growth," says Ravi Srivastava, a development economist who teaches at the Centre for the Study of Regional Development, School of Social Sciences at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University.Poll-bound Uttar Pradesh is the boiling cauldron of Indian politics and an economic laggard. Demographically, it should have been the chief growth driver for India; 93% of its citizens are below the age of 60. UP is essentially the population of Germany, France and England together crammed into the area of United Kingdom. It contributes less than 8% to the country’s GDP and for the past several years, irrespective of who was in power, the state’s growth has stagnated at around 6%.Even that growth would not have been possible if not for the fertile Gangetic belt which helps produce 18% of the country’s food grain. Agriculture is still a major driver of UP’s economy, contributing a quarter of the state’s output and supports the livelihoods of more than half the population, according to World Bank estimates.“The state of governance in UP is such that no private investment happens there," says Santosh Mehrotra, professor of economics at the Centre for Informal Sector and Labour Studies of the School of Social Sciences at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University.The poor state of governance is visible in the crime statistics of the state. In 2015, the police received over 5.9 million complaints, up from 2.9 million the previous year, according to the National Crime Records Bureau. To be sure, this could be because of better reporting of crime rather than an actual increase. The office of the UP director general of police told ET that the state had vastly improved and automated its redress infrastructure.It said the state had set up five modern control rooms and district level reporting infrastructure had been automated. It said police have been equipped with GPS-enabled phones and they reach the spot within 15 minutes of the control room receiving a call on its distress telephone number 100.Yet, last year the police registered only about 2.7 million cases against 5.9 million complaints. Until three years ago, the number of complaints received by police and actual cases registered were exactly the same. In 2014, when the difference first started showing, UP police got 2.9 million complaints and registered 2.6 million cases. The widening gap shows that though reporting has increased, police action lags behind.“Every complaint need not be a crime that police may register a case," UP director general of police Javed Ahmad told ET over telephone from Lucknow. “In many cities automation has also led to a rise in the number of complaints received," Ahmad said. However, he said he could not immediately comment on the widening chasm between the number of complaints and the cases registered.UP’s politics has centred on caste and religion which political parties have used opportunistically to create vote banks, fueling rifts and deepening fault lines. A Hindustan Times report relying on granular data collected from police stations in UP said the state reported 1,600 communal incidents in the first four months of 2016, the most compared to the same months of any previous year.DGP Ahmad says a large number of them cannot really be called “communal incidents" but merely get tagged so because the opposing parties are from different communities. “If a Muslim bicycle rider hits a Hindu pedestrian, it is not a communal incident," he explained. Anecdotal evidence suggests that communal tensions in Uttar Pradesh are on the rise in the past three years beginning with the Muzaffarnagar riots in 2013 which left 62 dead. Last year a Muslim man was lynched in Dadri for suspicion of keeping cow meat in his refrigerator.JNU’s Srivastava, who helped prepare the first human development report of the state, says poor law and order and governance makes producers and businessmen uneasy. “A large number of producers in UP are Muslims. And if you are a Muslim producer, you are doubly insecure,” he says hinting at the simmering communal tensions.Srivastava says UP’s agriculture has been declining for lack of crop diversification and technology plateauing. Besides, traditional industries which are more scattered across the state in areas such as Allahabad, Gorakhpur, Bareilly, Kanpur and Lucknow are declining. New industries are concentrated in the hubs of Noida and Ghaziabad. According to Srivastava, Noida and Ghaziabad accounted for over 37% of the net value added, nearly 35% of total invested capital and 37% of the persons employed in UP in 2010-11. That means without the two districts, UP’s output will fall by more than a third.In September, the Asian Competitiveness Institute of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy ranked UP the last among Indian states in ease of doing business. It ranked 14 in an assessment of states’ implementation of business reforms for the year up to June 2016 by the World Bank and the central government. Announcing the rankings, commerce and industry minister Nirmala Sitharaman had said they were based on a 340-point business reform action plan and their implementation by the states.Despite its high population of young people, the state has not been able to create enough jobs and the situation is likely to be compounded in the coming years as more youth join the job market. Those dependent on farming are leaving it as plot sizes shrink and yields stagnate. Increasing enrolment in schools also ensures that more youngsters are kept off farms and are never likely to turn to agriculture.JNU’s Mehrotra says a unique situation is emerging where the young who enroll in schools come out as semi-educated job seekers and join those who are leaving farming. He says about five million people are now leaving agriculture annually and 3 million of them are in UP and Bihar.That also accounts for the large scale migration from the state. Census 2001, which gives the last available definitive number, showed UP topping the list of net migration out of a state at 2.6 million. Majority of the migrants move out looking for jobs and livelihoods.Mehrotra says there are some signs of governance improving. He points to the health sector as an example. During the previous government, there were two chief medical officers in each district, one for regular government work and another in charge of the National Rural health Mission, a centrally funded project. “NRHM was a huge moneymaking opportunity. Akhilesh government seems to have managed to bring some order to the sector," he says.While chief minister Akhilesh Yadav may have made some headway in improving governance, Uttar Pradesh lacks a comprehensive plan for economic growth. And India’s most populous state’s underperformance will continue to drag down overall growth.Dinesh.Narayanan@timesgroup.com