Human Development Index (HDI)

For decades, a country's development was judged almost entirely by its per-capita income (GDP per head). The Human Development Index (HDI), introduced by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in its Human Development Reports, was designed to correct this narrow view by measuring development as an improvement in people's lives, not merely in the size of the economy.

HDI is built from three dimensions, each converted into an index between 0 and 1 and then combined (using a geometric mean in the UNDP's current methodology):

The combined HDI value ranges from 0 (lowest human development) to 1 (highest), and the UNDP ranks countries each year from this value. This is exactly why HDI is the natural bridge, in this chapter, between the earlier discussion of population/human-capital and the broader idea of development covered in the previous chapter: HDI is, in effect, a scorecard of how well a country has converted its human resource into genuine human welfare.

India's HDI position: India's HDI value has been rising steadily over recent decades as life expectancy, schooling and income have all improved, though India continues to be classified by the UNDP in the "medium human development" category in most recent Human Development Reports, with its HDI value in the low-to-mid 0.6 range and its global rank in the lower-middle band among the roughly 190-odd countries the UNDP ranks (the exact value and rank are revised and published afresh by the UNDP in each year's report, so students should quote whichever year's figure their examination material specifies, rather than treating any single number as permanent). …