Human Development Index (HDI)
Published on 19 Mar 2025
• India has moved up a rank on the global Human Development Index (HDI), according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report ‘Breaking the gridlock: Reimagining cooperation in a polarised world’.
• The report stated that while India ranked 135 in 2021, it had moved up to 134 in 2022.
• HDI was introduced by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in 1990.
The dimensions of HDI are;
✅Health dimension: Assessed by life expectancy at birth
✅Education dimension: Measured by the mean of years of schooling for adults aged 25 years and expected years of schooling for children of school entering age.
✅ Standard of living dimension: Measured by gross national income per capita at purchasing power parity in US dollars.
• The scores for the three HDI dimensions indices are then aggregated into a composite index using geometric mean.
• HDI sets a minimum and maximum for each dimension known as goalposts and then shows where each country stands to these goalposts, expressed as values between 0 and 1.
• The countries are classified into four categories of human development achievements;
Very high human development: HDI value 0.800 and above
High human development: HDI value 0.700-0.799
Medium human development: HDI value 0.550-0.699
Low human development: HDI value below 0.550
HDI and India
After a drop in 2021, India’s HDI value increases from 0.633 to 0.644 in 2022, placing the country in the medium human development category.
With a Gender Inequality Index value of 0.437 in 2022, India has shown progress and fares better than the global average of 0.462.
India’s life expectancy at birth has slightly improved from 67.2 years in 2021 to 67.7 years in 2022.
There is an overall increase in expected years of schooling (EYS) from 11.9 years to 12.6 years.
The Gross National Income (GNI) per capita also improved from $6,542 to $6,951.