Indians are living longer, getting better educated and earning more than what they were doing five years back, says the latest Human Development Report (HDR) by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). However, the country seems to have run really hard only to stay in the same place.
The ranking given by the HDR has not improved, staying at 134 (from among 182 countries considered), even though the country has been given an improved human development index (HDI) value of 0.612. The report said that despite the global economic slowdown, India’s growth estimates of around 6% was among the highest in the world.
“India has made steady progress. Its HDI value has gone up steadily from 0.556 in 2000 to 0.612 in 2007,” said Patrice Coeur-Bizot, the UNDP’s resident representative in India. The index measures the average progress of a country in human development and India’s improvement is a result of an increase in its HDI component indicators.
Despite this, why does India find itself not moving up the ladder? Because changes in ranking are not just related to the performance of an individual country but to the progress made relative to other countries.
According to Jayati Ghosh, professor in the School of Social Sciences, Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, the main reason for India’s ranking remaining stagnant is that the growth in the health and education sectors is relatively slow compared to the improving GDP.
“This shows that the economy is not equally distributed due to which a large number of people haven’t benefited from the improving GDP. Clearly India is not moving as fast as other countries,” said Ghosh.
China, ranked 92 with 0.772 HDI value, registered the largest gain in rank - of seven places — followed by Colombia and Peru, both countries improving by five places each. This was due to a relatively fast economic growth, increases in income and life expectancy and, in case of China, also due to improvement in education.
