what are the limitation of HDI? elaborate them
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Answer:
The HDI is supposed to be an index that operationalises Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach, an economic theory asserting that, “the purpose of development is to improve human lives by expanding the range of things that a person can be and do.” However, the HDI in practice focuses too narrowly on capabilities for education, life expectancy, and income. It fails to fully account for many other important capabilities in development, such as political and social factors. Empirical findings in a paper by scholar Mark McGillivray show that the HDI generally “reveals little more than any one of the preexisting development indicators alone reveal”.
The HDI in practice focuses too narrowly on capabilities for education, life expectancy, and income © Yann Forget / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0.
Including more of Sen’s capabilities in the HDI would create a more comprehensive measure. Particularly in the case of India, it is essential to have a more inclusive approach to account for its unique development challenges such as population growth and the caste system that would otherwise be overlooked by the HDI. This article thus takes the argument of Hicks that Sen’s capabilities and the human development approach together has a “distinctive value