Pricing, entitlements and allocation need to be looked at carefully in the coal sector if the present mess has to be sorted out. This article proposes certain measures which can break the impasse and argues for a break-up of Coal India into smaller units as a possible solution.

In this paper analyse the performance of Indian States across three critical sectors – health, education and infrastructure. To enable us to read through multiple indicators of the three sectors, construct an index for each using the Principal Component Analysis technique.