Question

Kerala, with town per capita income has a better human development ranking the Punjab.hence,per capita income is not a useful criterion at all and should not be used to compare states Discuss.

Answer 1

If we compare the per capita income of Kerala and Punjab we can see that the per capita income of Punjab is more.But Kerala is a state with high literacy rate, low infant mortality , less school drop outs, higher life expectancy for women compared .Thus, we can come to the conclusion that inspite of low per capita income, Kerala occupies a better human development ranking than Punjab.Per capita is not the only criteria to judge human development.

Answer 2

No, I do not agree with the statement that per capita income is not a useful criterion at all. Kerala, with lower per capita income has a better human development ranking than Maharashtra because, human development ranking is determined using a combination of factors such as health, education, and income. So, this does not imply that per capita income is not useful. Rather, per capita income is one of the development factors and can not be neglected. The World Bank uses per capita income as the criterion for measuring development and comparing states. But this criterion has certain limitations because of which determination of Human Development Index (HDI) is done using this criterion along with some other development factors like health, education etc. If the rate of population growth, is higher than the rate of growth of national income, this will lead to fall in per capita availability of goods and services and economic welfare.