Twenty years is a good enough time to assess how countries of the world, irrespective of the economic or political system they follow, have performed in promoting human development. Successive Human Development Reports (HDR), since 1990, have mainstreamed health and education as critical indicators of human progress and contributed to international policy structures. For instance, the Millennium Development Goals, aimed at using international financial resources to reduce global poverty, can...

The latest Human Development Report, or HDR, (2010), marking its 20th anniversary, is both remarkable and useful. Remarkable because it brims with intellectual confidence, born out of a sense of vindication over the “conceptual brilliance and continued relevance” of Mahbub ul-Huq’s original human development paradigm set out in the first sentence of the 1990 report — “People are the real wealth of nations.” The idea of human development, which, through...

Eight Indian States are home to 421 million multidimensionally poor people, more than the figure of 410 million in 26 poorest African countries. The Multidimensional Poverty Index — which identifies serious simultaneous deprivations in health, education and income at the household level in 104 countries — brought out in the latest United Nations Human Development Report has calculated that South Asia is home to half of the world's multi-dimensionally poor population,...

The world has made significant progress in income, education and health over the past 40 years, but the gains have been uneven and in some places war and the ravages of AIDS shortened life spans, according to a United Nations report on Thursday. Over all, average life expectancy around the globe jumped to 70 years in 2010, up from 59 in 1970. School enrollment through high school reached 70 percent...

India’s performance at the Commonwealth Games in 2010 has been its best so far – second on the medals list.However, another kind of ‘competition’ ranked 84 countries in accordance with achievements in a different field this week. India was a lowly 67th. The field was hunger, measured by combining the proportion of people undernourished, the proportion of underweight children and the child mortality rate. The Global Hunger Index (GHI) 2010 –...