The Human Development Report of the UNDP attracts a lot of attention partly for the theme it chooses each year to explore but much more for the Human Development Index (HDI). Everyone wants to know who went up and who moved down. This year India has stayed at 134 while China has gone up seven places to 92.
So what do we conclude ? Has India not progressed despite the high growth rate of the last few years? What we find is that between 2000 and 2007 India?s HDI score moved from 61.3 to 63.4. China moved from 71.3 to 71.4. China has moved up seven places while its HDI score is stagnant and India retains its rank while its score goes up by a couple of points. These things are of course quite usual in the way the index has been set up but it can mislead popular imagination. Now I know what HDI measures, as I was involved at the time of its first being mooted. But the HDI has not changed since 1990 except in small details. It is time someone rethought about it. Sri Lanka has improved its HDI score continuously since 1980, even accelerating after 1995 .
How does Sri Lanka manage to improve its score consistently despite a twenty-five year old civil war which led to massive killings on all sides? In the middle of human suffering crises, Sri Lanka marches on triumphantly in its HDI. Should we not raise some questions about the adequacy of a measure of human development which so spectacularly misses the bus ?
The problem is that indicators chosen have little to do with the actual short-run human misery on the ground and more to do with statistics which are longer-run indicators. Thus life expectancy, which is one of the three basic variables, is interpreted as if it told us how long people can expect to live. But of course it does nothing of the sort. It is a summary of the age-specific mortality rates which a cohort born today will confront, not over its own life time, but all at once if it speeded through from age zero to its end of life, virtually in the year of its birth.
To improve its level, the key is to get infant mortality down and then life expectancy reaches a level beyond which it is hard to shift. You may have a slaughter going on in the country but life expectancy can hardly budge. Pinochet saw the beauty of this and while he was dictator of Chile. This of course is not to condone India?s dismal performance. India?s failure is in health and education, both in terms of primary and secondary education enrolment and adult literacy. It is due to the failure in the first forty years after independence to pursue pro-poor rather than elitist policies . India was too busy building machine tools and space rockets to educate its masses. Even the change in policy since 1991 has not had the impact it should on HDI because the development gains are filtered through politically and spread about by an inefficient public sector.
HDI is a macro measure, and has few, if any, micro foundations. One cannot ask the question as to what the HDI of an individual or a household is, and how the household by its own behaviour can enhance its human development. What we need to do is to ask these questions and then enable households to find substitutes for government policy which would improve their lives.
After all, it is not enough to enrol your child at school, if the teacher is not there to teach. Similarly the point is not to worry about life expectancy but your own health and invest in healthcare, especially for the girl child. Primary health care centres run by the local government may not have any personnel around when you need them, though the money spent on them boosts the expenditure statistics on health . If we measure development by inputs, we learn much less than if we measure outcomes.
HDR and HDI were revolutionary contributions to development thinking in the 1990?s, but twenty years on, perhaps, there should be a rethinking of their conceptual basis.
?The author is a prominent economist and Labour peer
