Mapping human development

The first Human Development Report of India, released recently, brings to light inter-State disparities and variations and the gap in development between urban and rural areas.

THERE is a growing realisation that human well-being has to be measured using indicators other than just the economic. Poverty is therefore seen not only as a state of deprivation of incomes but as a condition in which deprivation spans an entire social, economic and political context. This approach, which has been reflected time and again in the United Nations Human Development Reports, now finds a resonance in the first National Human Development Report of India, released recently. Human development is all about those desirable outcomes that should be realised through conventional means of well-being. These desirable outcomes are ends in themselves and though they may not have a direct economic value apart from their enabling properties, they enhance the sense of overall well-being.

The 297-page Report, prepared by the Planning Commission, relies a lot on data from the Census of India, 2001 and National Sample Survey Organisation and National Family Health Surveys. With more than five decades gone after Independence and more than a decade spent for experiments with liberalisation, such a report should have emerged earlier. At least three State governments, notably those of Madhya Pradesh, Sikkim and Rajasthan, have already brought out their State development reports.

The Report, which is an attempt to map the state of human development, reiterates the three critical dimensions of well-being. These are essentially the ability to live a long and healthy life; education, that is the ability to read, write and acquire knowledge; and command over resources, which is an enabling factor for a decent and socially meaningful life. A composite set of indicators have been estimated from these broad indicators. They are, the Human Development Index (HDI), the Human Poverty Index (HPI) and the Gender Equality Index (GEI). The HDI reflects the state of human development for the society as a whole, the HPI estimates the state of the deprived in the early 1980s and early 1990s for all the States and Union Territories, and the GEI reflects the relative attainments of women as against those of men for the same period.

According to the Report the HDI has improved, though the gap in development between rural and urban areas continues to be significant. What is of relevance and importance is that the Report brings to light inter-State disparities and variations, which can only be brought out in a national report. While State government reports are axiomatically limited in their own way, world human development reports seldom focus on the micro-level indicators of a country and it is therefore best left to a national report to take stock of the state of human development in a country. The improvement of the HDI is not uniformly spread over all the States thereby indicating wide disparities. The Report also points out that the allocation of adequate public resources is not enough: what is available needs to be used in the most effective manner. Human attainments therefore appear to be better and more sustained in those parts of the country where there has been a social mobilisation (or social reforms) for human development and female literacy and empowerment.

Apart from Kerala, the Report states that Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Haryana have done well on the HDI. In the case of the GEI, gender equality reached the highest level in Kerala, followed by Manipur, Meghalaya, Himachal Pradesh and Nagaland in the 1980s. In general, women in southern India have been found to be better off than women in the northern States of Uttar Pradesh or Bihar. The Report specifically mentions Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh in the south and Haryana and Jammu and Kashmir in the north as having made considerable progress in improving the status of women vis-a-vis men in terms of human development indicators.

On the whole, gender disparity across the States has declined. However, the Report is silent on whether new disparities or forms of discrimination have emerged over the 1990s. It is also not clear if the juvenile sex ratio (0-9 years) and even the declining sex ratio has seriously been taken into account while estimating the various development indices. It would have been befitting at least to acknowledge the impending dangers of the very skewed juvenile sex ratio as reflected in the Census of India report. To discuss this aspect only in the section on "Health attainments and demographic concerns", is to underestimate grossly the importance of such an indicator. In fact, the declining sex ratios in the prosperous States only reaffirm the central thesis of all HDRs, that economic prosperity in terms of a better per capita income need not necessarily lead to overall human development as reflected in the broad dimensions of well-being.

The NHDR Report is interesting as it brings out not only the inter-State variations but also rural-urban disparities. For instance, it says that poverty has declined between the early 1980s and the early 1990s but the large differences between rural and urban areas in terms of accessibility to basic minimum services imply that while the availability of such services is taken virtually for granted in urban areas, they are scarce in rural areas. While conceptualising human development, the Report acknowledges that for the realisation of choices as well as access, certain social and political processes are required to translate available means into socially desirable outcomes. In general, low levels of attainment have been found among women and people who reside in rural areas.

The attainment levels of people belonging to the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes are also lower than those of other people. Eight indicators have been used to map the human development of States. The Report presents the status of human development in a diagrammatic format called development radars, which span two points of time - the early 1980s and the early 1990s. The eight indicators are per capita consumption expenditure, incidence in poverty, life expectancy at age one, infant mortality rates, access to safe drinking water, intensity of formal education, proportion of households with pucca houses, and literacy rate for the age group of seven years and above. These indicators have been selected as they reflect the attainments on the three critical dimensions of well-being - longevity, education and command over resources. It would have only been pertinent to include the sex ratio too as an indicator.

On the whole, Kerala's achievements appear to be impressive, with the lowest rural urban disparities in the country. Kerala is followed by Himachal Pradesh. Haryana, which has one of the worst juvenile as well as adult sex ratios, shows a balanced development with significant gaps in rural and urban attainments. But then, the sex ratio has not been considered as a relevant indicator. Punjab, interestingly, shows balanced development on most indicators except in the case of infant mortality rate. Urban Sikkim, on the other hand, has recorded significant progress during the decade on almost all indicators.

One very important indicator that reflects the state of economic well-being is per capita consumption expenditure. It is well accepted that the distribution of consumption expenditure between food and non-food items reflects the economic well-being of the population. Poor households are expected to spend substantially on food items as against non-food items. With economic prosperity and growth, one expects a decline in the proportion of expenditure on food items. While there has been some decline in this category, in Assam, Bihar and Orissa, the share of food items out of the total expenditure remained rather high.

The Report not only elaborates on the indicators of the various States but also undertakes certain steps towards prescribing policies and intervention. For instance, in the section that deals with health attainments and demographic concerns, it quite categorically states that there has been a misplaced emphasis on the maintenance and strengthening of private health care services at the expense of the broadening and deepening of the public health care system, which is targeted at controlling the incidence of disease, particularly communicable diseases in rural areas.

THE Report also deals with some other critical aspects of well-being. For example, it dwells on the status of the elderly, child labour, disabilities and crimes against women. It also conceptualises an alternative framework of governance where it boldly discusses the problem of ad hocism and corruption and the need to deal with them with proper institutional, supportive and delivery mechanisms. Regarding corruption, the Report states that merely shrinking the economic role of the state by resorting to deregulation, liberalisation and privatisation is not necessarily the solution to the problem. Social monitoring through credible and empowered structures will have to be established for even the highest public offices. The right to information, the Report states, will have to be the starting point for some of these changes.

The NHDR is comprehensive in outlook and detail. It could have focussed more on the impact of the economic policies on general well-being and human development over the last one decade. It could have at least touched upon the likely consequence of liberalised policies on the indicators that reflect human attainments. Although it is a bold initiative, more micro-level data and macro-level policies as also the public's response to them should be reflected in subsequent reports.