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.
4 comments:
very nice Shantanu, keep writing.
Good attempt, commnedable effort.
I like ur defination. Its a real challenge to redifine this terminology and try to integrate Amrtya Sen's philosophical concept of human developemnt in practice by means of achieving happiness as a measure of development.
Keep it up
Saba
Its not difficult to think of additional elements which in principle one would like to include in an HDI. The problem is to choose indicators which are fundamental to well-being and available for a considerable number of countries. The clever feature of the HDI, for all its weaknesses, is that it combines such fundamental indicators as length of life, access to knowledge and range of consumer choices, using indicators which are available on a comparable basis for some 170 countries, rich middle income and poor.
But shan...have you given a thought on effective quantification of these relative n intangible terms such as happiness and spiritual development..More often than not as in the spiritual case it cud turn out to be NotApplicable for some countries! So now how to plug these holes??
Cheers
Raghavendra D
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