The 1998 district-wise human development index (HDI) and GDI statistics
http://www.mp.nic.in/mphdr/genind.htm
http://www.mp.nic.in/mphdr/humind.htm
The HDI is made up of 3 components: education index, health index and poverty index. Hoshangabad ranks 11th in the state in education index (which itself is pretty good).
GenderDevelopmentIndex is composed overall of again several components: worker participation ratio, share of earned income, health, education etc. If you look at just the overall GDI (as the govt has chosen to do), GDI for Hoshangabad is 27th. But if you look at the females combined education index, Hoshangabad ranks 7th in the state (at 58% literacy rate for women, only Datia, Indore, Raisen, Jabalpur, Bhopal and Narasimhapur have higher female literacy rates than Hoshangabad).
Increase in literacy rates was another stat used by the govt to say it was not spectacular.
The literacy rate changes for MP based on 2001 census are at
http://www.censusindia.net/cendata1/show_data54.php3?j=100&j1=23&j2=4&j3=Madhya%20Pradesh.
(see attached spreadsheet).
Based on this, the increase in rate of literacy in Hoshangabad is actually higher than Bhopal, Indore, Balaghat, Gwalior, and Jabalpur (all of which rank above Hoshangabad in the Education Index). In general, districts which have a high literacy rates to start with tend to have slower increases in literacy rates, perhaps because govts tend to focus their energies on the lower literacy districts.
srikanth