India ranks 135^th on Human Development Index: UNDP

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in its recent publication ‘The 2014 Human Development Report’ ranked India at 135^th position for the year 2013 and categorizing the country amongst the medium human development category. India ’s HDI value is reported at 0.586 which is a marginal increase from 0.583 registered in 2012, leaving India ’s rank unchanged from the previous year. While, between 2000-2013 HDI value for India increased from 0.483 to 0.586 posted an annual average growth rate of 1.49%.

The sub-index called Multidimensional Poverty Index, which considers health, education and living standards reported an index value of 0.282 down from 0.283 in 2010. The poverty index further enumerated that 32.86% of people in India lived on US$ 1.25 a day. On Gender inequality index, India is ranked at 127^th position with an index value of 0.563.  In education, India registered a literacy rate of 62.8% in adults and 81.1% in youth. While the percentage of GDP as expenditure on education was 3.3%. The report also highlighted the social competencies wherein it posted 9.3% for unemployment rate, 10.7% for youth unemployment and 11.8% for child labour.

At global level, top five countries on HDI were Norway at HDI 0.944, Australia at 0.933, Switzerland at 0.917, Netherlands at0.915 and US at 0.914.  While the lowest ranked nations on HDI were Sierra Leone at 0.374, Chad at 0.372, Africa at 0.341, Congo DR at 0.338 and Niger at 0.337. Amongst BRICS nations China was ranked at the top at 15^th rank with HDI value of 0.891 followed by Russian Federation at 57^th for HDI value of 0.778, Brazil at 79^th rank for HDI value of 0.744 and South Africa at 118^th rank for HDI value of 0.658.

Overall, the report said that despite recent progress in poverty reduction, more than 2.2 billion people are either near or living in multidimensional poverty. That means more than 15% of the world’s people remain vulnerable to multidimensional poverty. At the same time, nearly 80% of the global population lack comprehensive social protection. About 12% (842 million) suffer from chronic hunger, and nearly half of all workers more than 1.5 billion are in informal or precarious employment. In addition, the 2013 HDR revealed that more than 40 developing countries with the majority of the world’s population had greater gains on the Human Development Index than would have been predicted given their situation in 1990.

Warm regards,

Dr. S P Sharma

Chief Economist