India ranks 131 on Human Development Index 2020 (HDI)

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  India ranks 131 on Human Development Index 2020 (HDI)

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1. Status: Out of 189 countries, India has ranked 131 on the Human Development Index 2020 prepared by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). With an HDI value of 0.645, the country fell in the medium human development category. It has been there for quite some time now.
2. Change: The UNDP has revised and updated the underlying data and adjusted the goalpost, making it difficult to accurately compare India’s ranking this year and in 2019. But the country report gave some statistics tracing India’s journey in human development between 1990 and 2019.
3. Journey of India’s Human Development Index: The report stated that since 1990, the HDI value of India has increased to 0.645 from 0.429, registering an increase of over 50%. During the same period, the life expectancy at birth in India rose by nearly 12 years, while mean years of schooling witnessed an increase of 3.5 years. During this while, the expected years of schooling also rose by 4.5 years. The GNI per capita of India also increased by nearly 274%.
4. India’s HDI trends compared to others: The UNDP compared India’s value in the HDI with other countries in South Asia, viz, Bangladesh and Pakistan. As against India’s rank at 131, Bangladesh ranked at the 133rd position, while Pakistan stood at 154th place. In the South Asian region, India’s HDI is more than the region’s average which stands at .641, while India is also above the average value of 0.631 among the medium HDI category countries. However, if adjusted for inequality in the distribution of human development across all the people of India, which HDI recognises as a shortcoming of the actual HDI value.
5. IHI: So the HDI report also gives an Inequality-adjusted HDI or the IHDI. After this adjustment, the HDI value for India fell by 26.4%, causing the value to reach 0.475. This adjustment also caused Bangladesh’s value to fall by 24.4%, surpassing India’s IHDI value and standing at 0.478. Meanwhile, Pakistan’s IHDI value fell to 0.384, decreasing by 31.1%. While the IHDI value for India was at par with the average IHDI value of the South Asian region, the medium HDI countries’ IHDI value stood at 0.465.
6. Gender development: The UNDP also calculates the Gender Development Index (GDI). As per the HDR 2020, the GDI value of India is 0.820, with the GDI value for females standing at 0.573 and that for males at 0.699, showcasing a wide contrast. In this measure, India is behind Bangladesh, with a GDI value of 0.904, while it stayed ahead of Pakistan (0.745). The average GDI for the South Asian region stood at 0.824, while that for medium HDI countries was 0.835, with India’s value being lower than both. As for life expectancy at birth, females in India had a value of 71.0 years, while that for males was 68.5 years.
7. Education: For education, the index takes into account expected years of schooling for children, and mean years of schooling for adults. The expected years of schooling for males in India was valued at 11.7 years, while that for females was 12.6 years. On the other hand, mean years of schooling for males was 8.7 years and for females was 5.4 years. To calculate the economic resources, the report takes into consideration the estimated GNI per capita for males and females. For females, this value was $2,331, while for males, it was at $10,702.
8. GII: The report also calculates Gender Inequality Index (GII) to highlight gender-based inequalities in the countries, taken on three measures – economic activity, reproductive health and empowerment. The GII value of the country was 0.488, which made it rank at the 123rd place out of the 162 nations. Economic activity is measured by the labour market participation, which stood for Indian males at 76.1% and for females at 20.5%.

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