21-Jul-2022: Human Development Index (HDI) in NER

Government of India has accorded top priority for the development of North Eastern Region. In all, 55 non-exempted Central Ministries/Departments are mandated to spend at least 10% of their Gross Budgetary Support (GBS) for Central Sector and Centrally Sponsored Schemes in North Eastern Region (NER). The Central Government Ministries / Departments have spent Rs. 3,36,640.97 crore under 10% GBS since 2014-15 to 2021-22 for the development of North Eastern Region. Within this, the 10% GBS expenditure by Central Ministries/ Departments in NER in 2021-22 was Rs.70,874.32 crore. In 2022-23, the Budget Estimate for 10% GBS expenditure by Central Ministries/ Departments in NER is Rs.76,040.07 crore.

However, in collaboration with NITI Aayog, Ministry of Development of North Eastern Region (MDoNER) has prepared the comprehensive NER District SDG (Sustainable Development Goal) Index. The NER District SDG Index (Baseline Report 2021-22) measures and ranks districts of the 8 NE States on social, human, economic, infrastructural and environmental dimensions of development. This is the first time that this Index has been prepared at District level in India. The NER District SDG Index is a tool to not only closely monitor the efforts, achievements and highlight critical gaps in the region, but also helps as a useful trigger for ramping up targeted development initiatives by the Central and State Governments.

16-Dec-2020: India goes down two ranks in Human Development Index

India dropped two ranks in the HDI standing at 131 out of 189 countries. However, if the Index were adjusted to assess the planetary pressures caused by each nation’s development, India would move up eight places in the ranking.

For the first time, the UNDP introduced a new metric to reflect the impact caused by each country’s per-capita carbon emissions and its material footprint, which measures the amount of fossil fuels, metals and other resources used to make the goods and services it consumes. This is called “Planetary Pressure-adjusted HDI” (PHDI).

India’s gross national income (GNI) per capita on the basis of purchasing power parity (PPP), too, fell.

India’s HDI value for 2019 is 0.645, which put the country in the medium human development category.

Between 1990 and 2019, India’s HDI value increased from 0.429 to 0.645, an increase of 50.3%.

Norway topped the index, followed by Ireland and Switzerland. Hong Kong and Iceland complete the top five. India, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Nepal, Cambodia, Kenya, and Pakistan were ranked under countries with medium human development with a rank in between 120 and 156 among the 189-countries.

10-Dec-2019: Human Development Report 2019

The demonstrations sweeping across the world today signal that, despite unprecedented progress against poverty, hunger and disease, many societies are not working as they should. The connecting thread, argues a new report from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), is inequality.

Different triggers are bringing people onto the streets -- the cost of a train ticket, the price of petrol, demands for political freedoms, the pursuit of fairness and justice. This is the new face of inequality, and as this Human Development Report sets out, inequality is not beyond solutions.

The 2019 Human Development Report (HDR), entitled “Beyond income, beyond averages, beyond today: inequalities in human development in the 21st Century,” says that just as the gap in basic living standards is narrowing for millions of people, the necessities to thrive have evolved.

A new generation of inequalities is opening up, around education, and around technology and climate change -- two seismic shifts that, unchecked, could trigger a ‘**new great divergence**’ in society of the kind not seen since the Industrial Revolution.

In countries with very high human development, for example, subscriptions to fixed broadband are growing 15 times faster and the proportion of adults with tertiary education is growing more than six times faster than in countries with low human development.

What used to be ‘nice-to-haves’, like going to university or access to broadband, are increasingly important for success, but left only with the basics, people find the rungs knocked out of their ladder to the future, which pioneers a more holistic way to measure countries’ progress beyond economic growth alone.

The report analyzes inequality in three steps: beyond income, beyond averages, and beyond today. But the problem of inequality is not beyond solutions, it says, proposing a battery of policy options to tackle it.

Thinking beyond income: The 2019 Human Development Index (HDI) and its sister index, the 2019 Inequality-Adjusted Human Development Index, set out that the unequal distribution of education, health and living standards stymied countries’ progress. By these measures, 20 per cent of human development progress was lost through inequalities in 2018. The report, therefore, recommends policies that look at but also go beyond income, including:

• Early childhood and lifelong investment: Inequality begins even before birth and can accumulate, amplified by differences in health and education, into adulthood. For example, children in professional families in the United States are exposed to three times as many words as children in families receiving welfare benefits, with a knock-on effect on test scores later in life. Policies to address it, therefore, must also start at or before birth, including investing in young children’s learning, health and nutrition.
• Productivity: Such investments must continue through a person’s life, when they are earning in the labour market and after. Countries with a more productive workforce tend to have a lower concentration of wealth at the top, for example, enabled by policies that support stronger unions, set the right minimum wage, create a path from the informal to the formal economy, invest in social protection, and attract women to the workplace. Policies to enhance productivity alone are not enough, however. The growing market power of employers is linked to a declining income share for workers. Antitrust and other policies are key to address the imbalances of market power.
• Public spending and fair taxation: the report argues that taxation cannot be looked at on its own, but it should be part of a system of policies, including public spending on health, education, and alternatives to a carbon-intensive lifestyle. More and more, domestic policies are framed by global corporate tax discussions, highlighting the importance of new principles for international taxation, to help ensure fair play, avoid a race to the bottom in corporate tax rates, especially as digitalization brings new forms of value to the economy, and to detect and deter tax evasion.

Looking beyond averages: Averages often hide what is really going on in society, says the HDR, and while they can be helpful in telling a larger story, much more detailed information is needed to create policies to tackle inequality effectively. This is true in tackling the multiple dimensions of poverty, in meeting the needs of those being left furthest behind such as people with disabilities, and in promoting gender equality and empowerment. For example:

• Gender equality: Based on current trends, it will take 202 years to close the gender gap in economic opportunity alone, cites the report. While the silence on abuse is breaking, the glass ceiling for women to progress is not. Instead, it is a story of bias and backlash. For example, at the very time when progress is meant to be accelerating to reach the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, the report’s 2019 Gender Inequality Index says progress actually is slowing. A new “social norms index” in the Report says that in half of the countries assessed, gender bias has grown in recent years. About fifty per cent of people across 77 countries, said they thought men make better political leaders than women, while more than 40 per cent felt that men made better business executives. Therefore, policies that address underlying biases, social norms and power structures are key. For example, policies to balance the distribution of care, particularly for children, are crucial, says the report, given that much of the difference in earning between men and women throughout their lifecycle is generated before the age of 40.

Planning beyond today: Looking beyond today, the report asks how inequality may change in future, looking particularly at two seismic shifts that will shape life up to the 22nd century:

• The climate crisis: As a range of global protests demonstrate, policies crucial to tackling the climate crisis like putting a price on carbon can be mis-managed, increasing perceived and actual inequalities for the less well-off, who spend more of their income on energy-intensive goods and services than their richer neighbours. If revenues from carbon pricing are ‘recycled’ to benefit taxpayers as part of a broader social policy package, then such policies could reduce rather than increase inequality.
• Technological transformation: Technology, including in the form of renewables and energy efficiency, digital finance and digital health solutions, offers a glimpse of how the future of inequality may break from the past, if opportunities can be seized quickly and shared broadly. There is historical precedent for technological revolutions to carve deep, persistent inequalities – the Industrial Revolution not only opened up the great divergence between industrialized countries and those who depended on primary commodities; it also launched production pathways that culminated in the climate crisis.

The change that is coming goes beyond climate, says the report, but a ‘new great divergence’, driven by artificial intelligence and digital technologies, is not inevitable. The HDR recommends social protection policies that would, for example, ensure fair compensation for ‘crowd work’, investment in lifelong learning to help workers adjust or change to new occupations, and international consensus on how to tax digital activities – all part of building a new, secure and stable digital economy as a force for convergence, not divergence, in human development.

This Human Development Report sets out how systemic inequalities are deeply damaging our society and why. Inequality is not just about how much someone earns compared to their neighbour. It is about the unequal distribution of wealth and power: the entrenched social and political norms that are bringing people onto the streets today, and the triggers that will do so in the future unless something changes. Recognizing the real face of inequality is a first step; what happens next is a choice that each leader must make.

India’s position:

• India’s rank- 129. Last year’s rank- 130.
• Despite lifting 271 million people out of poverty between 2005-15, India still remains home to 28% (364 million) of the world’s poor.
• Between 1990 and 2018, India’s HDI value increased by 50 per cent (from 0.431 to 0.647), which places it above the average for countries in the medium human development group (0.634) and above the average for other South Asian countries (0.642). This means that in the last three decades, life expectancy at birth in India increased by 11.6 years, whereas the average number of schooling years increased by 3.5 years. Per capita incomes increased 250 times.
• India is only marginally better than the South Asian average on the Gender Development Index (0.829 vs 0.828), and ranks at a low 122 (of 162) countries on the 2018

Norway, Switzerland, Ireland occupied the top three positions in that order. Globally, there are 1.3 billion poor people. Around 661 million of these poor people live in Asia and the Pacific. South Asia constitutes 41% of the world’s poor.

22-Mar-2017: India slips to 131st rank in human development index

India slipped down one place from 130 to 131 among the 188 countries ranked in terms of human development. The 2016 Human Development Report (HDR) was released by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

India’s human development index (HDI) value of 0.624 puts it in the “medium human development” category, alongside countries such as Congo, Namibia and Pakistan. It is ranked third among the SAARC countries, behind Sri Lanka (73) and the Maldives (105), both of which figure in the “high human development” category.

The world’s top three countries in HDI are Norway (0.949), Australia (0.939) and Switzerland (0.939).

The HDI is a measure for assessing progress in three basic dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, access to knowledge, and access to a decent standard of living.

The report says 1.5 billion people worldwide still live in multidimensional poverty, 54% of them concentrated in South Asia. While poverty fell significantly from 1990 to 2015, inequalities sharpened in the region.

South Asia also had the highest levels of malnutrition in the world, at 38%, and the lowest public health expenditure as a percentage of the GDP (1.6%, 2014). India’s public health expenditure was even lower, at 1.4% of the GDP. However, it did make some gains between 1990 and 2015, improving life expectancy by 10.4 years in this period. Child malnutrition also declined by 10 percentage points from 2015, and there was a modest gain in infant and under-five mortality rates.

The report praised India’s reservation policy, observing that even though it “has not remedied caste-based exclusions”, it has “had substantial positive effects”. It pointed out that “in 1965, for example, Dalits held fewer than 2% of senior civil service positions, but the share had grown to 11% by 2001”. The HDR also hailed the national rural employment guarantee programme as a “prime example” of “combining social protection with appropriate employment strategies”.

The report noted with approval India’s progressive laws, especially the Right to Information, National Food Security, and Right to Education Acts.

It commended the Indian grassroots group Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sanghatan for popularising social audits of government schemes.

Noting that women, on an average, have lower HDI than men across the world, the report pointed out that the largest gender disparity in development was in South Asia, where the female HDI value is 20% lower than the male value.

In South Asia, gender gaps in entrepreneurship and labour force participation caused an estimated income loss of 19%. “Between their first and fifth birthdays, girls in India and Pakistan have a 30% to 50% greater chance of dying than boys,” the report noted.

While India’s HDI value increased from 0.428 in 1990 to 0.624 in 2015, it still had the lowest rank among BRIC nations. However, its average annual growth in HDI (1990-2015) was higher than that of other medium HD countries.