India has made much progress in improving its score on the United Nation’s Human Development Index (HDI) since 2000, yet it lags many poorer nations with a rank of 130 among 182 countries. India’s score has risen from 0.493 to 0.640 between 2000 and 2017, making faster progress than the world did on an average. The score for all nations during the same period improved from 0.647 to 0.728. Clearly, India still has a lot of catching up to do. For instance, 37.9 per cent of the children under five years of age suffer from stunting in India compared to the world average of 27.4 per cent. Healthy life expectancy at birth is 59.3 years in India compared to 63.5 per cent for the world. On most counts, Bangladesh does much better than India.

Improving the score requires the country to also narrow the gap on human development score between males and females — the HDI score for females in 2017 was 0.575 compared to 0.683 for males. Globally, that disparity is quite small — 0.705 for females compared to 0.749 for males. Labour participation rate for females is another area of concern — only 27.2 per cent of the women work outside their homes. In comparison, the labour participation rate for males is 78.8 per cent. There is also a regional disparity in development, with States such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar lagging the peninsular States.

Throwing more money into various programmes that are designed to improve healthcare, education, livelihood and standards of living alone is not the answer. The government and its agencies must also identify and overcome the socio-cultural barriers and taboos that hamper progress on human development. In many communities, adolescent girls are not allowed to go out of their homes alone. So they are made to drop out of school early and are not allowed to go to skill training centre or take up employment and are married off while still in mid-teens. Changing such attitude is necessary to not just narrow the gap in the score for males and females but also ensure sustained improvement on HDI.

Senior Deputy Editor

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