SEMESTER 4 GEOGRAPHY HONS.

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Web based Article shared By

Dr. Rajashree Dasgupta

Asst. Professor,
Dept. of Geography
Government Girls’ General Degree College, Kolkata -23

Human Development: Meaning, Objectives and

Components

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meaning-objectives-and-components/11754

Meaning of Human Development:

The term ‘human development’ may be defined as an expansion of human
capabilities, a widening of choices, ‘an enhancement of freedom, and a fulfilment of
human rights.

At the beginning, the notion of human development incorporates the need for
income expansion. However, income growth should consider expansion of human
capabilities. Hence development cannot be equated solely to income expansion.

Income is not the sum-total of human life. As income growth is essential, so are
health, education, physical environment, and freedom. Human development should
embrace human rights, socio-eco-politico freedoms. Based on the notion of human
development. Human Development Index (HDI) is constructed. It serves as a more
humane measure of development than a strictly .income-based benchmark of per
capita GNP.

The first UNDP Human Development Report published in 1990 stated that: “The
basic objective of development is to create an enabling environment for
people to enjoy long, healthy and creative lives.” It also defined human
development as “a process of enlarging people’s choices”, “and strengthen human
capabilities” in a way which enables them to lead longer, healthier and fuller lives.
From this broad definition of human development, one gets an idea of three critical
issues involved in human development interpretation. These are: to lead a long and
healthy life, to be educated, and to enjoy a decent standard of living. Barring these
three crucial parameters of human development as a process enlarging people’s

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choices, there are additional choices that include political freedoms, other
guaranteed human rights, and various ingredients of self-respect.

One may conclude unhesistantly that the absence of these essential choices debars or
blocks many other opportunities that people should have in widening their choices.
Human development is thus a process of widening people’s choices as well as raising
the level of well-being achieved.

What emerges from- the above discussion is that economic growth measured in
terms of per capita GNP focuses only on one choice that is income. On the other
hand, the notion of human development embraces the widening of all human
choices—whether economic, social, cultural or political. One may, however, contest
GDP/GNP as a useful measure of development since income growth enables persons
in expanding their range of choices.

This argument is, however, faulty. Most importantly, human choices go far beyond
income expansion. There are so many choices that are not dependent on income.
Thus, human development covers all aspects of development. Hence it is a holistic
concept. “Economic growth, as such becomes only a subset of human
development paradigm.”

Objectives of Human Development:

In the traditional development economics, development meant growth of per capita
real income. Later on, a wider definition of development came to be assigned that
focused on distributional objectives. Economic development, in other words, came to
be redefined in terms of reduction or elimination of poverty and inequality.

These are, after all, ‘a goods-oriented’ view of development. True development has to
be ‘people- centred’. When development is defined in terms of human welfare it
means that people are put first. This ‘people-oriented’ view of development is to be
called human development.

It is thus clear that per capita income does not stand as a true index of development
of any country. To overcome this problem and to understand the dynamics of
development, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) developed the
concept of Human Development Index (HDI) in the 1990s. This index brought in
revolutionary changes not only in development, but also in the policy environment in
which the government was assigned a major role instead of market forces.

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Economic development now refers to expanding capabilities. According to Amartya
Sen, the basic objective of development is ‘the expansion of human capabilities’. The
capability of a person reflects the various combinations of ‘doings and beings’ that
one can achieve. It then reflects that the people are capable of doing or being.
Capability thus describes a person’s freedom to choose between different ways of
living.

For example:
Can people read and write? Are foodstuffs distributed among people in a universal
manner? Do poor students get midday meal in schools? Do the poor children get
adequately nourishing diets at home? No one would doubt that an illiterate poor
person cannot have the same capabilities that a rich literate one gets. Thus capability
failure leads to poverty and deprivation. This perspective of development, as
enunciated by A. Sen, suggests why development economists put greater emphasis
on education and health.

There are many countries in the world which —despite high levels of per capita GDP
growth/ real income—experience high mortality rate, undernourishment rate, poor
literacy, and so on. This is a case called ‘growth without development’. M. P Todaro
and S. C. Smith assert: “Real income is essential, but to convert the characteristics of
commodities into functions…. surely requires health and education as well as
income.” In other words, income does not define peoples’ ‘well- being’ adequately.

Well-being, although a diverse notion, should consider health and education, in

addition to income. Sen’s intellectual insights and fundamental ideas induced UNDP
to formulate HDI as a comprehensive measure of development. It may be reiterated
that the HDI as used in the Human Development Reports to compare different
countries in the world has been designed as alternative to per capita GDP/GNP.
Today, it is the most single commonly used measure to evaluate development
outcomes.

Components of Human Development:

The noted Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq considered four essential pillars of
human development.

These are:
i. Equality,

ii. Sustainability,
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iii. Productivity, and

iv. Empowerment.

Equality:
If development is viewed in terms of enhancing people’s basic capabilities, people
must enjoy equitable access to opportunities. Such may be called equality-related
capabilities. To ensure equality-related capabilities or access to opportunities what is
essential is that the societal institutional structure needs to be more favourable or
progressive.

In other words, the unfavourable initial asset distribution, like land, can be made
more farmer-friendly through land reform and other redistributive measures. In
addition, uneven income distribution may be addressed through various tax-
expenditure policies. Economic or legislative- measures that interferes with market
exchange may enable people to enlarge their capabilities and, hence, well-being.

Further, to ensure basic equality, political opportunities need to be more equal. In

the absence of effective political organisation, disadvantaged groups are exploited by
the ‘rich’ to further their own interests rather than social goals. However,
participatory politics gets a beating by the inequality in opportunities in having basic
education.

It is to be added here that basic education serves as a catalyst of social change. Once
the access to such opportunity is opened up in an equitable way, women or religious
minorities or ethnic minorities would be able to remove socioeconomic obstacles of
development. This then surely brings about a change in power relations and makes
society more equitable.

Sustainability:
Another important facet of human development is that development should ‘keep
going’, should ‘last long’. The concept of sustainable development focuses on the
need to maintain the long term protective capacity of the biosphere. This then
suggests that growth cannot go on indefinitely; there are, of course, ‘limits to growth.’

Here we assume that environment is an essential factor of production. In 1987, the

Bruntland Commission Report (named after the then Prime Minister Go Harlem
Bruntland of Norway) defined sustainable development as ‘… development that
meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future

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generations to meet their basic needs.’ This means that the term sustainability
focuses on the desired balance between future economic growth and environ-mental
quality. To attain the goal of sustainable development, what is of great importance is
the attainment of the goal of both intra- generation and inter-generation equality.

This kind of inequality includes the term ‘social well-being’ not only for the present
generation but also for the people who will be on the earth in the future. Any kind of
environmental decline is tantamount to violation of distributive justice of the
disadvantaged peoples. Social well-being thus, then, depends on environ-mental
equality.

Productivity:
Another component of human development is productivity which requires
investment in people. This is commonly called investment in human capital.
Investment in human capital—in addition to physical capital—can add more
productivity.

The improvement in the quality of human resources raises the productivity of

existing resources. Theodore W. Schultz—the Nobel Prize-winning economist—
articulated its importance: “The decisive factors of production in improving
the welfare of poor people are not space, energy, and crop land; the
decisive factor is the improvement in population quality.” Empirical
evidence from many East Asian countries corroborate this view.

Empowerment:
The empowerment of people—particularly women—is another component of human
development. In other words, genuine human development requires empowerment
in all aspects of life. Empowerment implies a political democracy in which people
themselves make the decisions about their lives. Under it, people enjoy greater
political and civil liberties and remain free from excessive controls and regulations.
Empowerment refers to decentralisation of power so that the benefits of governance
are reaped by all peoples.

It focuses on grassroots participation which promotes democracy by enfranchising

the disadvantaged groups. Unfortunately, benefits are cornered by the elites because
of lack of empowerment of people. Participation as a goal is a feature of ‘bottom-up’
development strategy rather than ‘top-down’. Further, development policies and
strategies male-dominated. But the benefits of development are to be made ‘gender-
sensitive’.
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Discrimination against women in health and education is very costly from the
viewpoint of achieving development goals. Education of women can lead to a
virtuous circle of lower fertility, better care of children, more educational oppor-
tunity, and higher productivity. Above all, as women’s education rises, women’s
independence in making their own choices also increase.

Anyway, decentralization and participation empower people, specially the women

and the poor. It then breaks the ‘deprivation trap’. Mahbub ul Haq asserts: “If
people can exercise their choices in the political, social and economic
spheres, there is a good prospect that growth will be strong, democratic,
participatory and durable.”

Measures of Development:
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Measuring ‘development’ depends on what you understand by the term. If you take it
in purely economic terms, as the traditional view did, then the GNP per capita is the
measure for assessing development.

A major objection to its use is the failure to include non-marketed (and, therefore,
non-priced) subsistence production (for instance, wheat which farmers produce for
their own consumption) and much of a housewife’s work and other welfare and
income distribution considerations. As a result, there have been numerous attempts
to remedy these defects and to create a composite indicator of development.

Basically, indicators of development can be classified in two groups—those that

measure development in terms- of ‘normal’ pattern of interaction among social
economic and political factors and those that measure development in terms of the
‘quality of life’.

In 1970, a study was conducted by the United Nations Research Institute on Social
Development (UNRISD). The study attempted to select the most appropriate
indicators of development and conducted an analysis of the relationship between
these indicators at different levels of development. The result of the study was the
construction of a composite social development index.

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The new index consisted of 16 core indicators (9 social indicators and 7 economic
indicators) and was found to correlate more highly with individual social and
economic indicators than did per capita GNP. The rankings of some countries under
the development index differed from their per capita GNP rankings. It was also
found that the development index correlated more closely with per capita GNP in the
case of developed countries than in the case of developing ones.

Another study was made by Adelman and Morris to seek a measure of development
by analysing the pattern of interaction among social, economic and political factors.
They classified 74 developing countries on the basis of 41 variables. The method of
factor analysis was used to examine the interdependence between social and political
variables and the level of economic development. They found numerous correlations
between certain key variables and economic development.

A major criticism of these studies was that they sought to measure development in
terms of structural change in the country rather than human welfare. There is also
the implicit assumption that developing countries must develop along the lines of the
developed countries.

Further, there is an undue emphasis on measuring inputs (such as number of doctors

per 1000 population or enrolment of figures in school) rather than on outputs (such
as life expectancy, literacy) which are the actual objectives of development.

In response to these criticisms, further studies were conducted to develop composite

indicators to measure development in terms of meeting the basic needs of the
majority of the population of a country or in terms of ‘quality of life’. This led to the
development of a new index.

It was in 1979 that Morris D. Morris developed a single composite index using three
indicators— life expectancy at age one, infant mortality and literacy. For each
indicator, the performance of a country is rated on a scale of 1 to 100, where 1
represents the ‘worst’ performance and 100 the “best’ performance. In case of life
expectancy, the upper limit of 100 was assigned to 77 years and the lower limit of 1
was assigned to 28 years.

Similarly, for infant mortality, the upper limit was set at 9 per 1000 and the lower
limit at 229 per 1000. Literacy rates, measured as percentages 1 to 100, provided
their own direct scale. Once a country’s performance in life expectancy, infant
mortality and literacy has been rated on a scale of 1 to 100, the composite index—the
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Physical Quality of Life Index (PQLI)—for the country is calculated by averaging the
three ratings, giving- equal weightage to each.

A study conducted in early 1980s found that countries with low per capita GNP
tended to have low PQLIs and countries with high per capita GNPs tended to have
high PQLIs although the correlation between GNP and PQLI was not substantially
close. There were also some countries with high per capita GNP but very low PQLIs.

On the surface, PQLI seems to be free of the basic problems associated with GNP as a
measure of development. It aims at incorporating welfare considerations by
measuring the ends of development in forms of quality of life.

It also incorporates distributional characteristics since a country cannot achieve high

national averages of life expectancy, infant mortality and literacy unless majorities of
its population are receiving the benefits of progress in each of these areas. Moreover,
like GNP, this simple measure can be used to make inter-country comparisons as
data on these indicators is easily available.

A major criticism of the PQLI, however, is that it fails to include many other social
and psychological characteristics suggested by the term ‘quality of life’—human
rights, justice, security and so on. The index has also been criticised on the grounds
of lacking a rationale in giving equal weightage to all the three indicators and the
possibility that measures such as life expectancy and infant mortality reflect
practically the same phenomenon.

To overcome the limitations of PQLI and other indicators, the Human Development
Index (HDI) was developed. The index was pioneered by the Pakistani economist,
the late Mahbub-ul-Haq, in partnership with the Indian economist, Prof. Amartya
Sen, and is being annually worked out by the United Nations Development
Programme (UNDP) since 1990.

The UNDP has defined human development as “a process of enlarging

people’s choices”. This depends not only on income but also on other social
indicators. (Earlier indices such as the PQLI took up the social indicators separately.)

The three basic indicators are: longevity, knowledge, and a decent standard of living.
Longevity is measured by life expectancy at birth; knowledge is measured by a
combination of the adult literacy rate and the combined primary, secondary, and

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tertiary gross enrolment ratios; and standard of living is measured by GDP per capita
(in purchasing power parity US$).

Before the HDI is computed, an index needs to be created for each dimension, the
life expectancy index, education index (comprising literacy index and gross
enrolment index) and income index. Performance in each dimension is expressed as
a value between 0 and 1 by applying the general formula: dimension index = (actual
value – minimum value)/ (maximum value – minimum value). Values (max, min)
for each dimension, life expectancy (85, 25), literacy (100, 0), gross enrolment ratio
(100,0) and per capita income in PPP US$ (40000, 100) are used in computing the
HDI.

The literacy index and gross enrolment index are given two-thirds and one-third
weightage to arrive at the education index. The HDI is calculated as a simple average
of the three.

Countries are classified into three categories: high human development (HDI 0.800
and above), medium human development (HDI 0.799-0.500) and low human
development (HDI below 0.500).

(In the beginning, only adult literacy was chosen as index of knowledge; it was later
decided to include school enrolment in this index.)

Once the increase in income passes the cut-off point, it is faced with diminishing
returns and this makes it necessary to let the social indicators determine the HDI.
Thus, the index is tuned to the growing concern among nations, regarding human
development.

The HDI, unlike other indices which measure absolute levels, ranks countries in
relation to each other. The index takes the progress made from the minimum
towards the maximum. The distance travelled is expressed in percentage terms. A
clear picture emerges of the wide disparities that exist in the levels of human
development between the developing and the developed countries.

The same exercise is repeated in respect of the other two components of the index.
The distance travelled in each case is then used as the basis for combining the three
devices, and this gives a common denominator to rank countries on a uniform scale.

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The human development indicators may be defined as some selected indices which
throw light on inter- and intra-country variations in socioeconomic and political
well-being. Thus, it is possible for geographers to study regional disparity with the
help of these indices.

The HDI is not quite perfect either, merely because it seems scientific and the
formulae used -to arrive at the final average looks complex; the weighting scheme
that it uses is just as ad hoc as any other. But it is certainly one way to combine
important development indicators.

The per capita GNP, ultimately, cannot be ignored totally. What matters is that the
national average truly reflects an even distribution of the income; that a large
majority of the population has an income closer to than farther from the national
average.

Equitable economic development is also the responsibility of the government, its

economic policies, interventions, and implementation strategies.

Other indices were introduced in the Human Development Report over the years.

The gender-related development index (GDI) was introduced in the 1995 report.

The GDI measures achievements in the same dimensions and using the same
variables as the HDI does, but taking account of inequality in achievement between
men and women. The findings show that hardly any country fares well by GDI;
gender equality is strongly associated with human poverty; and not necessarily with
income poverty and gender equality can be achieved at different income levels and
stages of development as well as under different cultural systems and political
ideologies.

The gender empowerment index (GEM) was also introduced in HDR 1995. The
GEM measures gender inequality in economic and political opportunities. The
Nordic countries do well in both GDI and GEM.

The human poverty index (HPI) was introduced in HDR 1997. While the HDI
measures average achievements in basic dimensions of human development, the HPI
measures deprivations in those dimensions. HPI-1 measures human poverty in
developing countries, while HPI-2 measures human poverty in industrialised
countries.

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HPI-1 is based on the indicators of probability at birth of not surviving up to age 40;
adult literacy rate; and deprivation in economic provisioning, measured by
percentage of people without access to safe water, percentage of people without
access to health services, and percentage of children under five years who are
underweight.

HPI-2 is based on the indicators of probability at birth of not surviving up to age 60;
adult functional illiteracy rate; percentage of people living below the income poverty
line (50 per cent of median disposable household income); and long-term
unemployment rate (12 months or more).

The technological achievement index (TAI) was a part of HDR 2001. The TAI is
aimed at capturing how well a country is creating and diffusing technology and
building a human skill base. The index measures achievements, and not potential,
effort or input. It has four components—creation of technology or more precisely the
capacity for innovation; diffusion of recent innovations summed up in the Internet;
diffusion of old innovations which is seen essentially as a function of the spread of
telephone connectivity and access to electricity; and human skills defined broadly to
encompass “basic education to develop cognitive skills and skills in science and
mathematics”.

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