essay on human development?
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It is the process of enlarging people’s choices. The human development approach looks at income as a means, not as an end, to people’s development, in contrast with the earlier growth models.
It is felt that there is no automatic link between income growth and human progress. HDR, 1990 has the following to say: The term human development here denotes both the process of widening people’s choices and the level of their achieved well-being. It also helps in distinguishing, clearly, between two sides of human development. One is the formation of human capabilities, such as improved health or knowledge; the other is the use that people make of their acquired capabilities.
In contrast with earlier theories and models, the human development approach broadens the concept to not only include issues such as basic needs and income, but also people’s choices — on what people should have to be able to ensure their own livelihood without ending up as mere beneficiaries.
“Human development is, moreover, concerned not only with basic need satisfaction but also with human development as a participatory dynamic process. It applies equally to less developed and highly developed nations”.
Human development is a process of enlarging people’s choices. In principle, these choices can be defined as infinite and change over time. But at all levels of development, the three essential ones are for people to lead a long and healthy life, to acquire knowledge and to have access to resources needed for decent standard of living. If these essentials are not available, many other opportunities remain inaccessible. But human development does not end there. Additional choices highly valued by many people, range from political, economic and social freedom to opportunities for being creative and productive, and enjoying personal self-respect and guaranteed human rights.
Human development has two sides. The formation of capabilities — such as improved health, knowledge and skills; and the use people make of their acquired capabilities — for leisure, productive purposes or being active in cultural, social and political affairs. If the scales of human development do not finely balance between the two sides, considerable human frustrations may result.
According to this concept of human development, income is clearly only one of the options that people would like to have, albeit an important one. But it is not the sum total of their lives. Development must, therefore, be more than just the expansion of income and wealth. Its focus must be people. The choices people make, as the development reports have pointed out, is a process which is best understood in the specific contexts of their time and space, for choices change and are specific to cultures.
Some choices may seem irrational. Over the years, various human development reports have laid stress on different aspects of these choices. The question that comes to mind is if the choices are so wide and specific to cultures, is it possible to measure them and is it possible to make comparisons. The report of 1990 does realise the problem of presenting a complex picture of all the choices people make. It says “Too many indicators would produce a perplexing picture — perhaps distracting policy makers from the main trends. The crucial issue therefore is of emphasis”.
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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.
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)
Earlier India was among low human development countries but now it has made a place in medium human development countries.