-Express News Service   For a country making strides as an emerging economic power, gender inequality remains an area where it compares poorly with the rest of the world. India is placed 129th among 146 countries in terms of GII, or gender inequality index, far behind neighbouring Sri Lanka at 74 and lagging most other countries in the region. Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan are ranked 112, 113 and 115 in terms of this...

-The Times of India   Despite impressive growth, Gujarat has not been able to reduce malnourishment levels, while Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, among the most backward in the country, have done better in improving the lot of their marginalized Dalits and tribals. These are some of the conclusions of the India Human Development Report 2011 released by the Centre on Friday. The report said high rates of child malnutrition were a major concern...

-The Business Standard   A day before the National Development Council is scheduled to meet and possibly debate on the poverty line and the Food Security Bill, the second India Human Development Report -2011 has said India progressed well in social development front, with higher enrollment rates in education, and a shift towards social inclusion of marginalised communities and minorities. The report, by the Institute of Applied Manpower Research, an autonomous body under...

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...