RETHINKING HDI AS A TIME SERIES, NOT A SNAPSHOT

THE release of the Human Development Index (HDI) 2023-24 by the United Nations Development Programme has once again brought this influential metric to the forefront of global discourse.

With a score of 0.644, India was ranked 134 out of 193 countries.

Hence, debates around the ranking were inevitable in the electoral discourse of 2024. But it's crucial to revisit the use and interpretation of this measure.

The HDI was the brainchild of Mahbub ul-Haq, who grew up amid the tumultuous partition of the subcontinent and passionately believed in a human-centric approach to development. The index is calculated by measuring longevity, health, education and standard of living. Longevity and health are assessed by life expectancy at birth, standard of living by gross national income (GNI) per capita, and education by the mean years of schooling for adults and the expected years of schooling for children. The HDI uses geometric mean (instead of arithmetic mean) of the indicators, thereby making sure no single dimension can disproportionately influence the overall score of a country.

While the HDI has undoubtedly been a valuable tool in measuring social progress, its ranking system and methodology warrant a re-evaluation. The index simplifies complex social dynamics into numbers, potentially distorting our understanding of progress. It is skewed towards nations with smaller, homogeneous populations.

The HDI's true value lies in tracking a nation's progress over time, rather than comparing it with others at a single point.

Comparing China and Sri Lanka, for example, is misleading. Despite their similar scores (0.788 and 0.780, respectively), China is an economic powerhouse while Sri Lanka recently survived a balance of payments crisis with external aid.