Human Development Index (HDI)

Copyright infringement not intended

In News

• India ranked 132 out of 191 countries in the recently released Human Development Index (HDI) 2021 by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
  • India’s rank declined from 130 in 2020 to 132 in 2021.
• The performance of nearly 90% of the countries has declined in human development due to multiple crises such as COVID-19, the Ukraine war, violent conflicts, Climate changes, environmental challenges, etc.
• India with an HDI score of 0.633 is in the medium Human Development category.
  • Decline in HDI from 0.645 in 2018 to 0.633 in 2021.
  • Falling life expectancy at birth from 70.7 years in 2018 to 67.2 years in 2021.
• Gender inequality increased by 6.7% globally.
  • In the latest report, India has shown a slight improvement in its Gender Inequality Index value as compared to the 2020 index.
• The report raised concern over the increasing polarisation which is deteriorating democratic freedom and human rights in many parts of the world.

Human Development Index

• The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) published its first Human Development Report (HDR) in 1990.
  • The report had a human development index (HDI) which was the first attempt to define and measure the level of development of economies.
• The ‘index’ was a product of a select team of leading scholars, development practitioners and members of the Human Development Report Office of the UNDP.
  • The first such team which developed the HDI was led by Mahbub ul Haq and Inge Kaul.
• The HDR measures development by combining three indicators;
  • Health: Measured by the life expectancy at birth.
  • Education: Measured by the mean of years of schooling.
  • Standard of Living: Measured by GNI (Gross National Income/Product) per capita at ‘Purchasing Power Parity in US Dollars (PPP $) instead of GDP per capita (PPP $) of the past.
• The scores for the three HDI dimension indices are then aggregated into a composite index using the geometric mean. The HDI facilitates instructive comparisons of the experiences within and between different countries.
• The HDI sets a minimum and a maximum for each dimension, called goalposts, and then shows where each country stands to these goalposts, expressed as a value between 0 and 1 (the index is prepared on the scale of one).
• The UNDP ranked the economies by their achievements on the above-given three parameters on a scale of one (0.000–1.000). As per their achievements, the countries were broadly classified into three categories with a range of points on the index:
  • High Human Development Countries: 0.800–1.000 points on the index.
  • Medium Human Development Countries: 0.500–0.799 points on the index.
  • Low Human Development Countries: 0.000–0.499 points on the index.

https://epaper.thehindu.com/Home/ShareArticle?OrgId=G3UA8LBO0.1&imageview=0

https://t.me/+hJqMV1O0se03Njk9