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.

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.

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,

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.

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