Simmi: I am Simmi. I am from Norway. I worked for World Bank for 7 years. My country has a very high Human Development Index (HDI) of 0.968.
Sam: I am Sam. I am from India. I worked for a grass root NGO for 6 years. My country has a low HDI of 0.619
Prof. Alex: Can any one of you explain, what is HDI for the understanding of the class
Simmi (Jumps in): The Human Development Index (HDI) is an index combining normalized measures of life expectancy, literacy, educational attainment, and GDP per capita for countries worldwide. It is claimed as a standard means of measuring human development as per UNDP.
Alex: Thanks Simmi
Simmi continues…: The basic use of HDI is to rank countries by level of "human development", which usually also implies to determine whether a country is a developed, developing, or underdeveloped country.
Sam: But…….what about happiness, what about suicide rates, what about family cohesiveness, what about problems created because of over consumption and what about per capita CO2 emissions. Does HDI account for these?
Sam continues: Western societies create labels and cram them up the media pipes and bombard us with those labels of third world, poor, bad living conditions, dirty, uncouth. I agree we have garbage lying around in our cities. But that's not all that describes a society. We are helpful, tolerant, childish, innocent, religious, historical, festive, traditional, hierarchical... long list. So much more than a 40%-of-their-population-earns-less-than-a-dollar society.
Sam continues: Let’s redefine the HDI today. Let’s include the positive measures like family cohesiveness per capita, happiness per capita, spiritual development per capita in HDI. Let’s include the negative measures like suicide rates per capita, money used for arms per capita, CO2 emissions per capita in our measures of HDI. Let’s redefine our narrow limits of rationality and correctness. Let’s be free from the set boundaries of political and academic correctness and achieve the greater heights of real human development.
With a sense of revolution in the head, Sam wakes up. It was a nice dream and Sam is looking forward to making it a reality.
