India moved one spot higher to 129 from 130 in the 2019 Human Development Index (HDI) ranking by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The ranking is conducted for 189 countries. India's improvement is on the back of decline in the number of people living in absolute poverty and an increase in life expectancy, educational levels and access to health care.
India has a score of 0.647, life expectancy of 69.4 years, expected years of schooling of 12.3 years, mean years of schooling of 6.5 years, and gross national income per capita of 6,829 ($)
What is Human Development Index?
The Human Development Index is a statistical tool used to measure a country's achievements and progress across its social and economic dimensions.
It takes the geometrical mean of the life expectancy at birth, with the education levels, and gross national income per capita. The educational levels are determined by the arithmetic mean of the expected years of schooling and the mean years of schooling.
Beyond income, beyond averages, and beyond today: India's role
The theme for this year's report is "Beyond income, beyond averages, beyond today: Inequalities in human development in the 21st century."
Beyond income focuses on public spending and fair taxation, power of employees, public expenditure on health and education. A leading example that the report denotes in this aspect is India's Mindspark application which uses technology to benchmark the initial learning level of every student and dynamically personalizes material to match the individual's level and rate of progress.
Along with this, India halved its absolute poverty but there were horizontal inequalities. Horizontal inequality is when people of similar origin and intelligence do not have equal success due to their socio-economic, cultural backgrounds and have a disparity in status, income and wealth.
This horizontal inequality has shown that the income growth of the bottom 40 percent—58 percent of the population between 2000 and 2018—was significantly below the average. At the other end of the spectrum the top 1 percent saw their incomes grow significantly more than the average since 2000 and since 2007.
Beyond averages focuses on the difference in socio-economic and cultural differences. It focuses on gender disparities and gender inequalities leading to the biases that exist in society. The proportion of both men and women who behave according to the gender biases and social norms have increased in India.
India also has taken strides in technology and is working towards measures in climate change according to the report for implementing the beyond today perspectives. The beyond today focuses on these two systematic changes.
