In News:

• According to the Human Development Index (HDI) 2021, India ranks 132 out of 191 countries, following a decline in its score.
  • The decline is consistent with the global trend since the outbreak of COVID-19.
• The Index is part of the United Nations Development Programme's (UNDP) recently issued Human Development Report (HDR) 2021-2022.

What’s in today’s article:

• About the HDI
• HDR 2021-2022

The Human Development Index (HDI)

• It is a statistical composite (first published in 1990 by the UNDP) index, which measures average achievement of a country in 3 basic dimensions -
  • Health as measured by life expectancy at birth
  • Knowledge measured by expected and mean years of education, and
  • Standard of living measured by per capita gross national income (GNI).

Background:

• It was developed by Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq and is now used to assess a country's development as part of the United Nations Development Programme's Human Development Report.
  • Along with HDI, HDR also presents:
    • the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI),
    • the Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI),
    • the Gender Inequality Index (GII) since 2010 and
    • the Gender Development Index (GDI) since 2014.
  • These were launched to track poverty, inequality and gender empowerment across different dimensions of human development.
• Th 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).

The Human Development Report 2021-2022:

Overall trends:

• According to the recent report, global progress is reversing, as the ‘Human Development' has fallen for two years in a row (2020 and 2021).
• Globally, nine out of ten countries' human development performance has slipped due to multiple crises such as COVID-19, the war in Ukraine and environmental challenges.
  • This indicates that global human development has stalled for the first time in 32 years.
• A significant contributor to the HDI's recent decline is a global decline in life expectancy, which has fallen from 72.8 years in 2019 to 71.4 years in 2021.
• The latest HDR highlights that stress, sadness, anger and worry have been increasing over the last decade and are now at record levels as the new normal takes shape.
• According to the report, the world is still not transitioning to a post-Covid-19 build-back-better scenario.
• On the contrary, developing countries across the globe are entering a period of sharp social, political and economic divergence, adversely affecting the most vulnerable and increasing gender inequality (which increased 6.7% globally).

India’s performance:

• India is ranked 132 out of 191 countries in the 2021 HDR's HDI. In the 2020 HDI, India was ranked 130th out of 189 countries.
  • India's HDI value in the "medium human development" category fell from 0.645 in 2020 to 0.633 in 2021, owing to a drop in life expectancy from 69.7 to 67.2 years.
  • The expected years of schooling in India are 11.9 years, while the mean years of schooling are 6.7 years. The per capita Gross National Income (GNI) is $6,590.
• According to the GII, India ranks 122 out of 170 countries, with a value of 0.490.
  • This indicates that India's GII value improved slightly in the latest report compared to the 2020 index (0.490 vs 0.493), despite gender inequality worsening between 2019 and 2020.
  • The GII measures inequality in achievement between women and men in three dimensions - reproductive health, empowerment and the labour market.
• Inference
  • According to UNDP, comparing rankings across countries is inaccurate because the HDI was calculated for 189 countries in 2020 and 191 countries this year.
  • Despite the decline in India's HDI value, it continues to outperform the average human development in South Asia.
  • Since 1990, India's HDI value has been steadily catching up to the global average, indicating a faster rate of progress in human development than the global average.