In 1990s Human Development has emerged as an important concept of development. Human Development means enlargement of human capabilities to enjoy all types of freedom – economic, political, social and cultural.
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), an agency of UNO, has constructed various indicators of human development such as Human Development Index (HD1), Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) and Human Poverty Index (HPI). The most important and most popular of these is HDI.
HDI is basically a composite index of three attainments of development: health, education and standard of living. For health, life expectancy at birth is taken as an indicator; for education, adult literacy and enrolment ratio are taken into consideration while Per Capita GDP at PPP is taken as an indicator of standard of living.
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As in the case of PQLI, first minimum and maximum values of the three attainments are determined. For Education Attainment Index (EA1), two-third weight is given to Adult Literacy Rate (ALR) and one-third weight is assigned to Combined Enrolment Ratio (CER). Therefore, educational index may be given as:
Average of the three attainment indices is calculated to give HDI. Value of HDI varies between 0 to 1.
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The UNDP publishes Human Development Report (HDR) annually. HDR is like a ‘report card’ of each country in the field of human development. HDR ranks countries on the basis of value of HDI. It classifies countries into following three categories:
(i) High human development countries (HDI value between 1 – 0.8)
(ii) Medium human development countries (HDI value between 0.79 – 0.5)
(iii) Low human development countries (HDI value between 0.49 – 0)
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Harlier India was among low human development countries but now it has made a place in medium human development countries.