India and Human Development

India and Human Development:

The HDI (Human Development Index)  for India was 0.640 in 2018, ranking 130th out of 189 countries. Between 1990 and 2017, India’s life expectancy at birth  increased by nearly 11 years, with even more significant gains in  expected years of schooling. Today’s Indian school-age children can expect to stay in school for 4.7 years longer than in 1990. Whereas, India’s GNI per capita increased by a staggering 266.6 percent between 1990 and 2017. However, inequality remains a challenge for India as it progresses economically. The gap between the rich and the poor seems to be widening.

An indicator of the level of health enjoyed by Indians is that  in 2017, terrorism claimed the lives of 766 Indians, or 0.007% of all deaths, while health reasons claimed 6.6 million Indians, or 90% of all deaths.

In 2017, the last year for which comparable data are available, India’s spending on defence was double its health expenditure, according to the 2017-18 budget.

Poor investment in health and education directly impacts the country’s productivity and economic growth. India ranks 158th out of195 countries in an international ranking of human capital.

There were 8,000 times more deaths from ill-health than terror in India in 2017: Deaths due to diabetes (254,500), suicides (210,800), infectious diseases (2 million) and non-communicable diseases (6.2 million) put together are 8,000 times the deaths caused by terrorism (766).

India’s public health spending is among the world’s lowest. With a fifth of the world’s population, India’s public India’s public-health spending was estimated to be 1.4% of GDP in 2017-18. The equivalent proportion of GDP spent on health in the Maldives is 9.4%, in Sri Lanka 1.6%, in Bhutan 2.5% and in Thailand 2.9%

The National Health Policy of 2017 talked about increasing public-health spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2025, but India has not yet met the 2010 target of 2% of GDP, IndiaSpend reported in April 2017.

India had the second-lowest score for quality of education in South Asia in 2016 (66 out of a possible 100, just ahead of Afghanistan’s 64) and behind group leader Sri Lanka (75).

In 2017, India’s school education budget, including central and state spending, was 2.6% of GDP, more than that for  defence and health taken separately.

However, almost half of India’s grade V students cannot read a grade II text and more than 70% cannot carry out division, according to the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2018.

The National Policy on Education, which guides India’s approach to education, has since 1968 recommended a minimum spending of 6% GDP on education but that target has never been met. There have been “pervasive and persistent failures in implementation leading to sub-optimal utilisation of the resources provided”, the 2016 document said.


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