Dubious record

India slipping in HDI ranking must serve as wake-up call for policymakers to get their strategies right on poverty, hunger and inequalities

For a country that is grappling with economic recession and the debilitating impact of the pandemic, this will only add to the all-pervading gloom. India has slipped two places, compared to the previous year, on the Human Development Index (HDI) and now ranked 131 among 189 countries. The Human Development Report (HDR) 2020, released by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), must serve as a wake-up call for the policymakers to introspect and correct the lacunae in the present strategies to fight poverty, hunger and inequalities. The report has revealed that India’s gross national income per capita fell to $6,681 in 2019 from $6,829 in 2018. India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Nepal, Cambodia and Pakistan have been ranked under countries with medium human development. Norway topped the index, followed by Ireland, Switzerland, Hong Kong and Iceland. The HDI measures average achievement on three basic aspects of human development — life expectancy, education, and per capita income. India’s HDI value for 2019 is 0.645, which puts the country in the medium human development category. Between 1990 and 2019, the country’s HDI value increased from 0.429 to 0.645. The average life expectancy for Indians at birth stands at 69.7 years, slightly lower than the south Asian average of 69.9 years. Glaring gaps in the implementation of anti-poverty programmes, lack of effective monitoring, multiple agencies working in silos while tackling malnutrition and poor performance by large States are among the factors responsible for the country’s poor performance on global scale.

On Global Hunger Index 2020 too India is ranked poorly at 94 among 107 nations and is put in the ‘serious’ hunger category. In fact, Pakistan and Bangladesh have fared better than India. Since the national average is affected a lot by large States like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh, they need to improve their performance to see an overall change in India’s ranking. If there is a high level of malnutrition in a State that has a high population, it contributes a lot to India’s average. Though India has some of the best designed nutrition programmes on paper, the implementation on the ground has been patchy and inconsistent. Research has shown that the top-down approach, lack of convergence and ineffective monitoring are resulting in poor nutrition indices. There is an urgent need to integrate actions to make public health and nutrition a priority across each sector. It is clear that the benefits of economic growth are not reaching the poor. This can be reversed only if the governments spend more to improve public education, healthcare, nutrition, social security and gender empowerment. The Covid-19 pandemic has further undermined food and nutrition security for many countries and its effects will likely ripple into the future.

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