Across four very different states — Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal — voters gave resounding mandates in the 2026 Assembly elections . The landslide victories underscored how decidedly voters wanted to either punish the incumbent and summarily change the way their states were being governed or, as was the case in Assam, to reward the incumbent without hesitation.

Here’s a look at some of the key macroeconomic data and the state government’s fiscal health. This is not just to understand why voters might have chosen the way they did, but also to recognise the main challenges the incoming Chief Ministers face.

Chart 1 captures a broader trend of how each of the four states grew and what happened to average incomes in each of the states over a decade between 2015 to 2024.

Chart 1.

Over this decade, Assam’s gross state domestic product (GSDP) — a measure of the overall size of the economy — not only grew at the fastest rate among the four states in question but also has been one of the fastest…