Human Development Index

Human Development Index

 Why in the news?

India has moved up a rank on the global Human Development Index (HDI), according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report ‘Breaking the gridlock: Reimagining cooperation in a polarized world’.

About Human Development Index:

• It is a summary composite measure of a country's average achievements in three basic aspects of human development: health, knowledge and standard of living.
• It is a measure of a country's average achievements in three dimensions of human development:

○a long and healthy life, as measured by life expectancy at birth;

○knowledge, as measured by mean years of schooling and expected years of schooling; and

○a decent standard of living, as measured by GNI per capita in PPP terms in US$.

• This is expressed as a value between 0 and 1. The higher a country's human development, the higher its HDI value. The HDI is the geometric mean of normalized indices for each of the three dimensions.
• The HDI also embodies Amartya Sen’s “capabilities” approach to understand human well-being, which emphasizes the importance of ends (like a decent standard of living) over means (like income per capita).
• Since 1990, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has been publishing the Human Development Report every year.

Highlights of the recent report

• The report stated that while India ranked 135 in 2021, it had moved up to 134 in 2022. A total of 193 countries were ranked in 2022 and 191 countries in 2021.
• In 2022, India saw improvements across all HDI indicators life expectancy, education and Gross National Income (GNI) per capita.
• Life expectancy rose from 67.2 to 67.7 years, expected years of schooling reached 12.6, mean years of schooling increased to 6.57 and GNI per capita saw an increase from $6,542 to $6,951.
• While the country has moved up in 2022, it is still behind its South Asian neighbours, such as Bangladesh (129th), Bhutan (125th), Sri Lanka (78th) and China (75th).

 Source: The Hindu