Development involves thinking about how we can work towards achieving goals.

1. Development promises of different people and different goals

• Different persons can have different developmental goals.
• Development for one may not be developed for the other. It may even be destructive for the other.
• Landless rural labourers want more days of work and better labour
• Local schools can provide quality education for their children and there is no social discrimination and they too can become leaders in the village.

2. Income and other goals

3. National Development

Different persons could have different as well as conflicting notions of a country’s development.

Comparison of different nations

• Some countries are generally called developed and underdeveloped countries.
• We compare different things; they could have similarities as well as differences.
• The income of the country is considered to be one of the most important attributes.
• Countries with more income are called developed countries.
• The average income or per capita income is the total income of the country divided by its total population.
• In World Development Reports, brought by the World Bank classifying the criteria of countries
• A country with a per capita income of US$ 49,300 is considered high-income countries and those with a per capita income of US$ 2500 are low-income countries.
• India comes in the low middle-income country because its per capita income in 2019 was US$ 6700.

Income and other criteria

• The per capita income of the states is different Haryana has the highest per capita and Bihar has the lowest per capita income.
• Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) indicates the number of children that die before the age of one year as a proportion of 1000 live children born in that particular year.
• The literacy rate measures the proportion of the literate population in the 7 and above age group.
• Net Attendance Ratio is the total number of children in the age group 14 and 15 years attending school as a percentage of the total number of children in the same age group.

4. Human Development Report (HDI)

• It is published by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and compares countries based on the educational levels of the people, their health status and per capita income.
• It ranks out of 189 countries.
• Life expectancy at birth denotes, as the name suggests, the average expected length of a person at the time of birth.
• Per capita income is calculated in dollars for all countries and each dollar would buy the same amount of goods and services in any country.
• Sri Lanka has higher and Nepal and Bangladesh have lower per capita incomes than India.

5. Sustainable development

Ground Water in India

• Recent evidence suggests that groundwater is under serious threat of overuse in many parts of the country.
• About 300 districts have reported a water level decline of over 4four meters during the past 20 years.
• Nearly one-third of the country is overusing their groundwater reserves.
• In another 25 years, 60 per cent of the country would be doing the same if the present way of using this resource continues.
• Groundwater overuse is particularly found in the agriculturally prosperous regions of Punjab and Western U.P., hard rock plateau areas of central and south India, some coastal areas and the rapidly growing urban settlements.

6. Exhaustion of Natural Resources

Reserves of crude oil

• The reserves would last only 50 years more. This is for the world as a whole.
• Different countries face different situations. Countries like India depend on importing oil from abroad because they do not have enough stocks of their own.
• If prices of oil increase this becomes a burden for everyone.
• There are countries like the USA which have low reserves and hence want to secure oil through military or economic power.
• Non-renewable resources are those which will get exhausted after a few years of use.
• We have a fixed stock on earth which cannot be replenished.
• We do discover new resources that we did not know of earlier.
• New sources in this way add to the stock. However, over time, even this will get exhausted.
• Consequences of environmental degradation do not respect national or state boundaries; this issue is no longer region or nation-specific.
• Sustainability of development is comparatively a new area of knowledge in which scientists, economists, philosophers and other social scientists are working together.
• In general, the question of development or progress is perennial.