Economy

KEY POINTS

Assessing Development

·         In India, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is used to assess development.

·         But, GDP is most frequently used to measure growth and the figures released by the government cannot reflect the true picture of development.

·         Because, it does not factored in the depreciation of environmental resources and deteriorating health conditions in a country in its assessment.

Need for such assessment

Environment

·         Agriculture – Every time we assess agricultural output, we assess only the productivity over a period.

·         The factors such as depletion of groundwater, intensity of water used for that productivity gets ignored in that output.

·         Hydropower projects – Export of power is a significant source of income for hill regions from the hydroelectric power projects.

·         But the degradation that the construction of hydropower projects causes in the form of disruption of habitat for animal and plant life, soil erosion, landslides, flash floods and more are often ignored.  

Health 

·         Take for example; the decline in the air quality in Delhi invariably leads to a rise in respiratory ailments, apart from other longer term illnesses.

·         Though residents of Delhi have a high level of per capita income, a large part of it goes in meeting health expenditure.

Road to future

·         Though, the economic growth appears to be directly link with development, it fails to measure the cost incurred by the people to deal with environment and health hazards which degrades the opportunities for development.

·         This creates a need to take into account the health costs of environmental pollution while calculating GDP.

·         To get a true picture of development, the impact of economic growth on the environment and health needs to be factored in. 

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