India jumps four positions on Human Development Index, moves to ‘medium’ category

India jumped four positions to rank at 131 out of 188 countries on the Human Development Index (HDI). With the move India is now classified in the ‘medium’ category, a significant improvement from ‘low’ category in the 1990s.

Devised and launched in 1990, HDI is a statistic, which ranks countries into four tiers of human development on the basis of indicators such as life expectancy, education, and per capita income. A higher lifespan, higher level of education, and higher GDP per capita results in a country scoring higher HDI.

Norway holds the number one position on the list, a position it has held consistently since 2009 rankings, followed by countries such as Australia, Switzerland, Germany and Denmark. India, with an HDI value of 0.624, stood far behind its Asian peers such as Sri Lanka and the Maldives on the index.

For India, unfortunately, regional disparities in education, health and living standards resulted in a 27 percent fall in HDI value from 0.624 to 0.454. However, the report also suggests a steady decline in relative global inequality over the past few decades, “driven by declining inequality between countries arising from the extraordinary economic growth in, primarily, China and India.”

As per the report, improvement in India's ranking shows the progress made by the nation in life expectancy and mean years of schooling over the last 2.5 decades. The report estimates India's life expectancy at birth at 68.3 years, whereas mean schooling years stood at 6.3 years.

While life expectancy for women was estimated at 69.9 years, for men the figure stood lower at 66.9 years. However, mean years for schooling estimates 4.8 years for women, which stood lower than 8.2 year for the same for me. India ranked 125 on gender inequality index.