HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
1. Understanding Growth and Development
Growth vs. Development
- Growth is a Quantitative, value-neutral change, that can be positive or negative.
- Development is a Qualitative change, always value-positive, and requires an increment or addition to existing conditions.
- Example: City population doubles from one lakh to two lakhs (growth), but if facilities and services remain the same, development does not occur.
Evolution of Development Perspective
- Economic Growth as Sole Measure: Previously, a country's development was measured solely by its economic growth.
- Shift to Quality of Life: Recognizing quality of life, opportunities, and freedoms as essential for development.
- Contributions of Mahbub-ul-Haq and Amartya Sen: Introduced the concept of human development focusing on enlarging choices and improving lives.
Human Development Principles
- Meaningful Lives: Development should enable people to live meaningful lives with purpose.
- Key Aspects: Leading a long and healthy life, gaining knowledge, and having the means to live decently.
- Access to Resources, Health, and Education: Crucial areas for human development.
Building Capabilities
- Barriers to Choices: Lack of knowledge, material poverty, social discrimination, inefficient institutions.
- Importance of Capabilities: Enhancing health, education, and resource access to broaden choices.
- Limitation of Choices: Without capabilities in health and education, choices become restricted.
Examples of Limited Choices
- Education: Uneducated child unable to pursue desired career paths.
- Resource Access: Poor individuals are unable to afford medical treatment, limiting their choices.
Measuring Human Development Indicators Developed to measure aspects like resource access, health, and education.
2. The Four Pillars of Human Development
- Equity: Ensuring equal access to opportunities for all individuals regardless of gender, race, income, or social status. Example: School dropout rates often reveal disparities, such as women and economically backward groups facing limited access to education, which restricts their choices and opportunities.
- Sustainability: Ensuring continuity in the availability of opportunities across generations. Resources environmental, financial, and human—must be managed sustainably to avoid limiting opportunities for future generations. For instance, emphasizing education for girls today ensures a brighter future for them and subsequent generations.
- Productivity: Enhancing human labour productivity through continuous development of capabilities. People are the real wealth of nations; investing in their knowledge and health leads to improved work efficiency and overall productivity.
- Empowerment: Granting individuals the power to make choices through increased freedom and capability. Empowerment is fostered through good governance and people-oriented policies, particularly focusing on empowering socially and economically disadvantaged groups to broaden their choices and opportunities.
These four pillars—equity, sustainability, productivity, and empowerment—form the foundation of human development, aiming to create a society where all individuals have equal access to opportunities, resources are managed sustainably for future generations, productivity is enhanced through continuous development, and people are empowered to make choices and lead fulfilling lives.
3. Approaches to Human Development
- Income Approach: Focuses on economic indicators such as GDP per capita as a measure of development.
- Welfare Approach: Emphasizes well-being and quality of life indicators beyond economic measures, such as health, education, and social welfare.
- Minimum Needs Approach: Highlights the fulfilment of basic necessities like food, shelter, healthcare, and education as fundamental to human development.
- Capabilities Approach: Considers people's capabilities, freedoms, and opportunities to lead a fulfilling life as central to development, emphasizing factors like education, health, and empowerment.
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Measuring Human Development
- Human Development Index (HDI): Measures countries based on health (life expectancy at birth), education (adult literacy rate, gross enrollment ratio), and access to resources (purchasing power), assigning equal weight to each dimension.
- Human Poverty Index: Complements HDI by measuring the shortfall in human development, focusing on non-income factors like survival probability, adult illiteracy, access to clean water, and child malnutrition.
Evaluation of Human Development Measures
- Accuracy and Reliability: HDI and HPI provide insights into achievements and shortfalls in human development but may not capture distributional aspects comprehensively.
- Refinement and Innovation: Continuous efforts to refine measurement methodologies and include new dimensions like political freedom, corruption levels, and other social indicators to better understand human development.
- Holistic Assessment: Combining various indices and measures offers a more nuanced and accurate assessment of human development by considering economic, social, and political factors together.
- Challenges and Future Research: Ongoing research explores additional factors influencing human development, such as environmental sustainability, cultural diversity, and social justice, to enhance measurement accuracy and policy relevance.
4. International Comparisons of Human Development
Size and Income Disparities
The size of a country's territory and its per capita income do not directly correlate with human development. Smaller nations and relatively poorer countries sometimes outperform larger and wealthier neighbours in terms of human development.
Examples of Contrasts
- Sri Lanka and Trinidad and Tobago have higher ranks in the Human Development Index (HDI) than India despite having smaller economies.
- Within India, Kerala performs better in human development compared to Punjab and Gujarat despite lower per capita income.
Classification of Countries
- Countries with High Index Value: Defined as those with an HDI score exceeding 0.8. Prioritization of education and healthcare reflects significant government investment in the social sector. Common characteristics include substantial investment in people, good governance, and often former imperial powers.
- Countries with Medium Index Value: Form the largest group, comprising 88 countries. Many emerged after World War II or from former colonies, with diverse social backgrounds. Improvement in human development is often seen through people-oriented policies, despite some facing political instability.
- Countries with Low Index Value: Comprise 32 countries with low levels of human development. Often small nations experience political turmoil, social instability, civil war, famine, or high disease prevalence. Urgent need for well-designed policies to address human development challenges in these regions.
Factors Influencing Human Development
- Government Expenditure: Significant investment in social sectors characterizes countries with higher human development scores.
- Political Environment and Freedom: Political stability and freedom play crucial roles in fostering human development. Countries with high human development tend to be politically stable and provide greater freedom to their citizens.
- Resource Distribution: The equitable distribution of resources contributes to higher levels of human development. Countries with low human development often prioritize defence spending over social sectors due to political instability and slow economic progress.
- Misconceptions and Policy Implications: Blaming cultural factors for low human development is misleading. Understanding patterns of government expenditure, political environment, and resource distribution is crucial for addressing human development disparities.
International comparisons of HDI reveal that investment in social sectors, good governance, and political stability are crucial for high human development. Low HDI is often linked to political instability and neglect of social spending. Culture or religion are not the main factors.
