Human Development Report 2016 : Key Findings

Major Findings of the Report:

• The report says 1.5 million people worldwide still live in multidimensional poverty, 54% of them concentrated in South Asia. 

• While poverty fell significantly from 1990 to 2015, inequalities sharpened in the region.

• South Asia also had the highest levels of malnutrition in the world, at 38%, and the lowest public health expenditure as a percentage of the GDP (1.6%, 2014). 

• India’s public health expenditure was even lower, at 1.4% of the GDP. However there was an improvement in India From 1990 - 2015 :- improving life expectancy by 10.4 years in this period. Child malnutrition also declined by 10 percentage points from 2015, and there was a modest gain in infant and under-five mortality rates.

• The report praised India’s reservation policy, observing that even though it “has not remedied caste-based exclusions”, it has “had substantial positive effects”. It pointed out that “in 1965, for example, Dalits held fewer than 2% of senior civil service positions, but the share had grown to 11% by 2001”.

• The HDR also hailed the national rural employment guarantee programme as a “prime  example” of “combining social protection with appropriate employment strategies”.
• It commended the Indian grassroots group Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sanghatan for popularising social audits of government schemes.
• The report pointed out that the largest gender disparity in development was in South Asia, where the female HDI value is 20% lower than the male value.

Key Facts:

India slips in human development index:- India slipped down one place from 130 to 131 among the 188 countries ranked in terms of human development, says the 2016 Human Development Report (HDR) released by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

India’s human development index (HDI) value of 0.624 puts it in the “medium human development” category, alongside countries such as Congo, Namibia and Pakistan.

Performance of India among SAARC Countries:- It is ranked third among the SAARC countries, behind Sri Lanka (73) and the Maldives (105), both of which figure in the “high human development” category.

The world’s top three countries in HDI are Norway (0.949), Australia (0.939) and Switzerland (0.939).