Why in News?

Recently human development index was released by United Nations Development Program(UNDP).

What is Human Development Index (HDI)?

• HDI - The Human Development Index is a summary measure of average achievement in key dimensions of human development
  • Long and healthy life
  • Being knowledgeable
  • Having a decent standard of living.
• HDR report – The index was released by the United Nations Development Program as part of its annual Human Development Report.
• Objective - It was created to emphasize that people and their capabilities should be the ultimate criteria for assessing the development of a country, not economic growth alone.

• Sub-Indices - HDI figure is an aggregate of the Life Expectancy Index (LEI), the Education Index (EI) and the Income Index (II).
• Each of the indices are classified into Low, Medium, High and Very High grades.
• Categorization of development – The index subdivides performances of countries into four category tiers - very high, high, medium and low human development.

• India’s score - India currently has a reported HDI of 0.644 in 2023-24 report with  medium human development category.

How are the sub-indices measured ?

• Life Expectancy Index - It is a scaled expression of life expectancy at birth of a country, as a fraction of the age range 20 to 85 years.
• A life expectancy of 20 years or below means the index is 0.000 and 85 years or more means 1.000.

• Education Index - It is an unweighted mean of two parameters - mean years of schooling, and expected years of schooling.
  • Mean of years of schooling – It is an aggregate measure of the average years of education received by a country’s adult population of aged 25 years and above.
  • It is expressed as a scaled index that saturates at 15 years of education.

• • Thus a country with 0 years of average education for its adult population scores 0.000 and it scores 1.000 if it achieves 15 or more years of schooling for its adult population.

• • Expected years of schooling - It is measured from current enrollment data in primary, secondary and tertiary education tiers relative to the total population of each of those age groups.
  • It is expressed as a scaled index that saturates at 18 years of education.

• Education Index- It  is the unweighted mean of MYSI and EYSI.

• Income Index - It quantifies the economic prosperity of an entity as a logarithmic scale expression of gross national income in purchasing power terms, per capita (GNI PPP per capita).
• It ranges between the range of $100 and $75000 international dollars.

• Final GDI – The actual human development index is the geometric mean of the LEI, EI and II figures. Thus,

What are the inadequacies of HDI?

• Over simplification - The HDI simplifies complex human development inequality, poverty, human security, and empowerment aspects into a single composite index.
• Unrepresentative data - The principal failure of the UNDP HDI score in the context of India is unrepresentative data.
• Inconsistent data – The data used by  UNDP for measuring life expectancy is inconsistent with the health ministry data.

• Backward looking of MYSI -  Mean years of schooling measures the historical educational attainment over at least half a century ago.

• Undermeasurement of GNI – UNDP number measured the Covid 19 period value and did not took account of the growth since the covid period.

• Neglects Inequality - Two countries with the same HDI score can have vastly different levels of inequality.
• Exclusion of Other Factors - The HDI does not consider other important factors such as environmental sustainability, political freedom, and cultural diversity.

What lies ahead?

• To address these issues, alternative indices such as the Inequality-Adjusted HDI and the Augmented HDI can be used.

Reference

Swarajya | Hacking the Human Development Index

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