This is the first of a two-part series on inequality in India. This article draws on the Access (In)Equality Index (AEI) 2026, produced by the Centre for New Economics Studies (CNES) at O.P. Jindal Global University. All figures cited are from the AEI 2026 report.Ask which Indian states give their residents the best access to a school, a clinic, clean water, a bank or a court, and the answer usually comes back as a list of the wealthiest states. Still, that answer only holds up in part – the missing part is where the most useful lessons lie.The Access (In)Equality Index (AEI) 2026, produced by the Centre for New Economics Studies at O.P. Jindal Global University, measures something most state rankings leave out. It asks how far residents can actually reach the services and opportunities on which a decent life depends.To answer that, the index draws on 60 indicators across five pillars, namely basic amenities, education, health, socio-economic security and justice.The last of these, which covers police, courts, prisons and legal aid, rarely sits alongside the other four in a single measure of development. The pillars are combined so that weakness in one cannot simply be hidden by strength in another, and states and Union Territories are scored separately.Read the AEI 2026 against each state’s income, and a striking picture emerges.The obvious suspectMoney matters, and it matters a great deal. Income per head accounts for roughly three-quarters of the differences in access between states. On average, a state with twice the per capita income of another scores about 0.11 points higher on the index. This is on a scale where the distance from the best state to the worst is about a third of a point.Also read: Why Inequality Looks Both Different and Similar in India and ChinaThe relationship holds even when the two smallest and richest states are set aside.This should surprise nobody. A state with more revenue can build more clinics, staff more schools and lay more pipes. A ranking that ignored this would be unfair to poorer states.But a ranking that stops there is unfair in a different way. It cannot distinguish a state that is simply rich from a state that does a great deal with what it has. To see that difference, the AEI 2026 asks a second question: Given a state’s income, what level of access would we expect it to provide, and how far does it actually depart from that expectation?Figure 1. Richer states score higher, but not all of them, and not by the same marginThe state that breaks the lineOne state sits so far above the line that it changes how the whole chart reads. Andhra Pradesh, a middle-income state, is outscored on access only by Goa, one of the two richest states in India. The margin by which Andhra Pradesh exceeds the score its income would predict is more than twice that of any other state.Kerala and Himachal Pradesh also sit well above the line, consistent with their long record of investment in public services. That much fits a familiar story. Andhra Pradesh fits it far less neatly, and the scale of its lead is a question the index raises rather than one it can answer on its own.The surprise near the bottomThe next name on the list is one few would expect. Bihar is the poorest state in India and remains among the lowest scorers on the index. Its residents have less access to essential services than residents of almost any other state, and nothing in the AEI 2026 suggests otherwise.And yet Bihar sits above the line. Given the resources available to it, Bihar delivers more access than its income alone would lead one to expect, more so than all but three states in the country. A state can be near the bottom of a ranking and still be doing better than its circumstances predict. Both things are true at once, and a league table can only ever show one of them.When prosperity does not travelBelow the line, the picture is just as unexpected. Two of the states that sit furthest beneath their predicted level are among the most prosperous and industrialised in the country, Gujarat and Karnataka. Both are more often cited for their economic dynamism than for any shortfall. On the AEI 2026, both deliver noticeably less access than their incomes would lead one to expect, and Gujarat records the largest shortfall of any state.A group of north-eastern states, among them Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur and Meghalaya, also falls short of its predicted level. The top of the ranking shifts too. Goa still delivers more than its income predicts, but Sikkim, one of the highest scorers on the index, sits close to the level its income would suggest. Its high position owes much to its high income.Figure 2. How much more (or less) access each state delivers than its income predictsWhere choices matter mostThe pull of income is not equally strong across the five pillars. It explains most of the differences between states in basic amenities and health, where housing, water, sanitation and hospital beds tend to follow fiscal capacity. In education and socio-economic security, it explains only about a third.That is a telling result. It suggests that access to schooling and to economic security depends to a greater extent on how public programmes are designed and run, and less on how much money a state has. These are the pillars in which the choices of state governments appear to count most relative to their means.What the gap can and cannot tell usSome caution is in order. These figures describe associations, and influence can run both ways, since better access to health, education and finance can itself raise incomes over time. The gap between a state’s actual and predicted score shows where it stands relative to its means. It does not, on its own, explain why.Also read: How to Measure India’s InequalityWhy Andhra Pradesh converts its resources into access so effectively, and why Gujarat and Karnataka do less well than their wealth would suggest, are questions that deserve close study by researchers and state governments alike. The pattern is consistent with a distinction Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen drew long ago, between gains in wellbeing that arrive through growth and gains that public action secures well before incomes are high.Two readings of the same data are both true. Richer states, on the whole, provide more access. And at any given level of income, some states provide considerably more than others. The first is a fact about resources. The second is a fact about what is done with them, and it is the one state governments can most directly change.While income sets the stage, what a state does about it in the distributive sense is a choice, and that has a deeper effect on Indians and their access to basic social, economic opportunities. The AEI 2026 report suggests that some states are making that choice far better than others.Part 2 of this analysis will focus on insights from the geographical distribution of AEI pillar data and what it says about the rising prosperity gap across India.Deepanshu Mohan is Dean and Professor of Economics at O.P. Jindal Global University. He is a Visiting Professor at LSE and a Research Fellow at University of Oxford. Ankur Singh is a Senior Research Assistant at Centre for New Economics Studies and studied Economics and Public Policy at O.P. Jindal Global University. Mahi Dutta is a Research Assistant at Centre for New Economics Studies and studies Economics and Public Policy at FLAME University, Pune.