Human Development

Why this chapter matters for UPSC: This chapter applies the idea of human development to India: how India ranks, how the Planning Commission measured its states, and which indicators (poverty, health, literacy, the child sex ratio) show the gaps. Mains has asked why human development lagged behind economic growth in India and how poverty is measured; Prelims tests the HDI's construction and the Multidimensional Poverty Index. This chapter was dropped from NCERT's rationalised edition: the 2026-27 reprint of India: People and Economy has nine chapters and none on human development. BharatNotes keeps it because the syllabus has not dropped the topic. The concepts and the HDI method remain in NCERT's Fundamentals of Human Geography (ch. 3 in 2026-27), covered on this site's page.

Contemporary hook: In UNDP's Human Development Report 2025 (data for 2023), India's HDI is 0.685, rank 130 of 193, shared with Bangladesh and up from 0.446 in 1990. NCERT's own figure, from the 2018 report, was 0.640 and the same rank, 130, out of 189 countries. On the poverty side, NITI Aayog's National Multidimensional Poverty Index: A Progress Review 2023 found that the share of Indians who are multidimensionally poor fell from 24.85% (2015-16) to 14.96% (2019-21), about 13.5 crore people.

🧠 First Principles — Read This First

Development can enrich some people and leave others behind. NCERT opens with Rekha, born sixty years ago into a small farming family in Uttarakhand, kept out of school while her brothers studied, widowed and dependent, who migrates to Delhi and finds jhuggi clusters, children begging at traffic lights and polluted air beside the city's roads and avenues. Her question is the chapter's: do development and underdevelopment coexist? NCERT's answer is that the common view of development, "Development is freedom", read as modernisation, industry, transport and modern medicine, is "partial and one-sided", a "western or euro-centric view". For a post-colonial country like India, colonisation, marginalisation, social discrimination and regional disparity show "the other face of development": developed enclaves for a few, while the scheduled castes, scheduled tribes, landless labourers, poor farmers and slum dwellers, and above all women, are the most marginalised.

Human development puts people, not output, at the centre. NCERT's definition: human development is "a process of enlarging the range of people's choices, increasing their opportunities for education, health care, income and empowerment". A long and healthy life, education and access to the resources for a decent standard of living, with political freedom, human rights and self-respect, are the "non-negotiable" choices. The first systematic attempt to measure development this way was UNDP's first Human Development Report in 1990; the 1993 report added that "development must be woven around people, not the people around development". The rest of the chapter measures India against that standard: income and poverty, health, and literacy, nationally and state by state.

PART 1 — Quick Reference

Key Ideas (NCERT)

India's HDI: NCERT's Figure and the Latest

Source: NCERT Class XII, India: People and Economy (2021-22), Table 3.1; UNDP, Human Development Report 2025, Statistical Annex Table 1. Values from different reports are not strictly comparable, because UNDP revises its data and method; HDR 2018 ranked 189 countries and HDR 2025 ranks 193. In HDR 2025 Iceland is first and Norway and Switzerland share second place.

India's Human Development Index by State (NCERT Table 3.4)

India's Health Indicators: NCERT and the Latest

Source: NCERT (2021-22), p. 28; Office of the Registrar General of India, Sample Registration System Statistical Report 2024 (published May 2026); UNDP HDR 2025, Tables 1 and 4.

PART 2 — Concepts & Narrative

Development: A Mixed Bag

NCERT describes India's development as "a mixed bag of opportunities as well as neglect and deprivations". Metropolitan centres and other developed enclaves have every modern facility for a small section of the population, while large rural areas and urban slums lack potable water, education and health infrastructure for most of their people. The distribution across social groups is starker still: NCERT says the relative and even absolute conditions of many marginalised sections have worsened as development proceeded. A further strand is environmental. Air, soil, water and noise pollution have produced a "tragedy of the commons", and the poor face three linked declines in capability: social, as displacement weakens social ties; environmental, through pollution; and personal, through disease and accidents.

NCERT's conclusion is pointed: development as practised "has not been able to address the issues of social injustice, regional imbalances and environmental degradation" and is widely seen as a cause of them. That is why human development came to be treated "as a separate issue", against the view that development is the remedy for all ills.

Human Development in India

NCERT records India, with a population of over 1.20 billion, as ranked 130 among 189 countries with an HDI of 0.640, in the medium human development group (HDR 2018). It adds that reservations have been expressed about the index itself. The HDI is insensitive to historical factors (colonisation, imperialism, neo-imperialism), socio-cultural ones (human rights violations, discrimination by race, religion, gender and caste), social problems (crime, terrorism, war) and political ones (the nature of the state, democracy or dictatorship, and the level of empowerment). These, NCERT says, matter especially for India and other developing countries.

The Planning Commission used UNDP's indicators to prepare a Human Development Report for India, with States and Union Territories as units; each State then prepared its own, with districts as units. Its final HDI used the same three dimensions as UNDP's, but the report also looked at economic attainment, social empowerment, social distributive justice, accessibility, hygiene and welfare measures. NCERT takes three of these in turn.

Indicators of Economic Attainment

A rich resource base and access to it by all, especially the poor and marginalised, is "the key to productivity, well-being and human development". GNP and its per capita availability measure the resource base; economic attainment depends on growth, employment and access to assets. Per capita income and consumption have risen, and the share of people below the poverty line has fallen consistently. For 2011-12 NCERT gives the Planning Commission's estimate: 25.7% in rural areas, 13.7% in urban areas and 21.9% for India (Table 3.2, from the Planning Commission's Press Note of July 2013).

NCERT groups the States and UTs by that table:

• More than 30% poor: Chhattisgarh (39.93%, the highest among States), Dadra and Nagar Haveli (39.31%), Jharkhand, Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh, Bihar, Odisha, Assam and Madhya Pradesh.
• 10 to 20% poor: Gujarat, Haryana, Jammu and Kashmir, Maharashtra, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Tripura, Uttarakhand and West Bengal.
• Below 10% poor: Andhra Pradesh (then undivided), Delhi, Goa, Himachal Pradesh, Kerala, Punjab, Sikkim, Puducherry, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Daman and Diu, and Lakshadweep (Andaman and Nicobar lowest, 1.00%).

Uttar Pradesh (29.43%), Karnataka (20.91%), Mizoram (20.40%) and Chandigarh (21.81%) fall between the bands NCERT names. NCERT defines poverty as "a state of deprivation", in absolute terms "the inability of an individual to satisfy certain basic needs for a sustained, healthy and reasonably productive living". It adds that GDP does not fully reflect the quality of life, since housing, public transport, air quality and drinking water also decide the standard of living, and it names jobless growth and unemployment as important reasons for poverty.

The state pattern of the national MPI repeats NCERT's map of poverty a decade earlier. In 2019-21 the highest headcounts were in Bihar (33.76%), Jharkhand (28.81%), Meghalaya (27.79%), Uttar Pradesh (22.93%) and Madhya Pradesh (20.63%); the lowest in Kerala (0.55%), Goa (0.84%), Tamil Nadu (2.20%) and Sikkim (2.60%). Uttar Pradesh, with about 3.43 crore people leaving poverty, accounted for the largest absolute fall.

Indicators of a Healthy Life

NCERT defines a healthy life as one free from illness and reasonably long, and names its measures: pre- and post-natal care to cut infant mortality and deaths of mothers after delivery, health care in old age, adequate nutrition and personal safety. India "has done reasonably well" on several of them between 1951 and 2015: the death rate fell from 25.1 to 6.5 per thousand, infant mortality from 148 to 37, and life expectancy at birth rose from 37.1 to 66.9 years for males and from 36.2 to 70 years for females. The birth rate fell from 40.8 to 20.8 but remained, NCERT says, "much higher than many developed countries". The latest Sample Registration System report (for 2024) puts the birth rate at 18.3, the death rate at 6.4 and infant mortality at 24 per thousand live births.

The Child Sex Ratio

NCERT calls the 2011 Census findings on the child sex ratio (girls per 1,000 boys aged 0-6) "very disturbing". With the exception of Kerala, the ratio declined in every State, and it was most alarming in the developed States of Haryana and Punjab, both below 850. The final Census 2011 figures are Haryana 834 and Punjab 846, against a national child sex ratio of 919 (927 in 2001). NCERT leaves the question open for students: is it social attitude or scientific methods of sex determination? The fact that the worst ratios were in prosperous States is the point to remember: income alone does not raise the status of girls.

Indicators of Social Empowerment

"Development is freedom", NCERT says again, now in the sense of freedom from hunger, poverty, servitude, bondage, ignorance and illiteracy. That freedom needs empowerment and participation, and access to knowledge about society and the environment is fundamental to it; literacy is "the beginning of access to such a world of knowledge and freedom".

NCERT's Table 3.3 gives the provisional Census 2011 literacy rates: 74.04% overall and 65.46% for females. It draws three features from it: literacy, total and female, is above the national average in most southern States; disparities between States are wide; and literacy is low in rural areas and among the marginalised, where the gap with the richer sections has grown even as literacy has risen. The final Census 2011 figures, published later in the Primary Census Abstract, are lower: 73.0% overall, 80.9% for males and 64.6% for females. On the final figures Kerala leads at 94.0% (female 92.1%), followed by Lakshadweep (91.9%) and Mizoram (91.3%), and Bihar is lowest at 61.8%, with the lowest female literacy (51.5%, just below Rajasthan's 52.1%).

Source: NCERT (2021-22), Table 3.3; Census of India 2011, Primary Census Abstract (final), literacy for persons aged 7 and above.

The Planning Commission's HDI for the States

Using these indicators, the Planning Commission calculated an HDI for the States and UTs. In its India National Human Development Report 2011 (values for 2007-08, NCERT Table 3.4), Kerala ranked first with 0.790, followed by Delhi (0.750), Himachal Pradesh (0.652), Goa (0.617) and Punjab (0.605). At the bottom of the 23 major States were Bihar (0.367), Odisha (0.362) and Chhattisgarh (0.358). NCERT asks students to note that India sits among the countries of medium human development.

NCERT gives three reasons for the spread. Education: Kerala's top value comes "largely due to its impressive performance in achieving near hundred per cent literacy", while Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Assam and Uttar Pradesh have very low literacy, and States with higher literacy show smaller gaps between male and female literacy. Economic development: economically developed States such as Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Punjab and Haryana have higher HDI values than Chhattisgarh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh. History: regional distortions and social disparities that developed during the colonial period "continue to play an important role in the Indian economy, polity and society". The government has tried to institutionalise balanced development through planning, with "significant achievements" that are "still below the desired level".

Gender Gaps in the Latest Report

The Human Development Report 2025 carries two gender measures that sharpen NCERT's point that women are "the worst sufferers". The Gender Development Index (the ratio of female to male HDI) is 0.874 for India, in group 5, the group with the largest gaps: female HDI 0.631 against male 0.722. Women live longer (73.6 years against 70.5) but have fewer years of schooling (mean 5.8 against 8.0) and far lower estimated income (about 4,543 against 13,273 PPP dollars). The Gender Inequality Index is 0.403, rank 102 of 172, built from the maternal mortality ratio (103 per 100,000 live births, 2020), the adolescent birth rate (14.1 per 1,000 women aged 15-19), women's share of parliamentary seats (14.8%), secondary education among adults over 25 (43.5% of women, 61.1% of men) and labour force participation (35.1% of women, 76.4% of men). The inequality-adjusted HDI is 0.475, a loss of 30.7% from the HDI.

Population, Environment and Development

NCERT ends with the debate that runs under the whole chapter. Development has improved the quality of life, but regional disparities, social inequality, discrimination, displacement, abuse of human rights and environmental degradation have grown with it. UNDP's Human Development Report 1993 tried to correct the biases built into the concept: it made people's participation and security the main issues, called progressive democratisation and empowerment the minimum conditions for human development, and gave civil society a constructive role in building opinion for lower military spending, demobilisation, a shift from defence to basic goods and services, and nuclear disarmament by the developed countries.

At the other extreme stand the Neo-Malthusians, environmentalists and radical ecologists, for whom a balance between population and resources is the necessary condition of a peaceful social life. In their view resources have expanded only marginally in three hundred years while population has grown phenomenally, so development's first task is to keep the two in balance. NCERT credits Malthus (it writes "Sir Robert Malthus"; his full name was Thomas Robert Malthus) as the first to voice concern about resources becoming scarce relative to population, and then names the flaw in the argument: resources are "not a neutral category". What matters is less their availability than their social distribution: rich countries and people command large resource baskets while the poor see theirs shrink, and the pursuit of more and more resources by the powerful is the prime cause of conflict.

NCERT then turns to India's own tradition, which it says has long been sensitive to the balance among the elements of nature. Mahatma Gandhi warned that industrialisation had institutionalised the loss of morality, spirituality, self-reliance, non-violence, mutual co-operation and care for the environment; for him austerity for the individual, trusteeship of social wealth and non-violence were the keys to higher goals for a person and a nation. NCERT says these views were "re-echoed" in four later works:

PART 3 — UPSC Integration

Frames that score. For "why has human development lagged growth?", use NCERT's two halves: the HDI's blind spots (history, discrimination, the nature of the state) and India's own indicators (poverty in 2011-12, literacy and the child sex ratio in 2011, the state HDI in 2007-08), then bring them up to date with the HDR 2025 values, SRS 2024 and the national MPI, naming each source. For poverty questions, keep the two measures apart: the Planning Commission's consumption poverty line (21.9% in 2011-12) and the multidimensional indices (Global MPI 16.39%, national MPI 14.96%, both for 2019-21). For a population-resources question, set the Neo-Malthusian view against NCERT's critique (distribution, not scarcity) and Gandhi's trusteeship.

MGNREGA in older answers. Many model answers on human development cite the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. It was repealed on 1 July 2026, when the Viksit Bharat - Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Act, 2025 came into force with a guarantee of 125 days of wage employment a year. Cite the new Act for anything after that date.

Exam Strategy

For Prelims: Know the HDI's three dimensions and India's HDR 2025 value and rank (0.685, 130 of 193); the difference between the GDI and the GII; how the Global MPI defines a poor person (deprived in at least one-third of weighted indicators); NCERT's 2011-12 poverty figures (21.9% India, 25.7% rural, 13.7% urban); the top and bottom States in NCERT's state HDI; and the final Census 2011 literacy figures (73.0%, Kerala highest, Bihar lowest).

For Mains: Begin with NCERT's definition and the "two faces" of development, use NCERT's three indicators with a State example for each, and close with the gender measures and the national MPI as current evidence.

Avoid: quoting 74.04% as the final 2011 literacy rate; mixing the Global MPI and the national MPI; comparing a State's Planning Commission HDI with a country's UNDP HDI as if they were the same index; and citing MGNREGA as a live scheme.

Practice Questions

Practice (UPSC-pattern, not past papers). Questions 1 to 4 are NCERT's own exercise MCQs, answered from NCERT's tables and the final Census.

Prelims:

1. Which one of the following States of India has the highest rank in the Human Development Index (NCERT Table 3.4)?
   (a) Tamil Nadu
   (b) Punjab
   (c) Kerala
   (d) Haryana

2. Which one of the following States of India has the lowest female literacy?
   (a) Jammu and Kashmir
   (b) Arunachal Pradesh
   (c) Jharkhand
   (d) Bihar

3. Which one of the following States of India has the lowest child sex ratio (0-6 years)?
   (a) Gujarat
   (b) Haryana
   (c) Punjab
   (d) Himachal Pradesh

4. Which one of the following Union Territories of India has the highest literacy rate?
   (a) Lakshadweep
   (b) Chandigarh
   (c) Daman and Diu
   (d) Andaman and Nicobar Islands

5. With reference to the Human Development Report 2025, consider the following statements:
   

   1. India and Bangladesh share the same HDI rank.
      
   2. India's Gender Development Index is higher than 1, because Indian women live longer than men.
      
   3. India's Gender Inequality Index rank is better than its HDI rank.
      Which of the statements given above are correct?
      (a) 1 and 2 only
      (b) 1 and 3 only
      (c) 2 and 3 only
      (d) 1, 2 and 3

6. In the UNDP-OPHI Global Multidimensional Poverty Index, a person is counted as poor when deprived in at least:
   (a) one of the ten indicators
   (b) one-third of the weighted indicators
   (c) half of the weighted indicators
   (d) one indicator in each of the three dimensions

Answer notes: Q2, Bihar's female literacy is 51.5% (final Census 2011); Q3, Haryana 834, Punjab 846; Q4, Lakshadweep 91.9% (final); Q5, statement 2 is wrong because India's GDI is 0.874, below 1, and statement 3 is right because the GII rank is 102 against an HDI rank of 130.

Mains:

1. Why did human development fail to keep pace with economic growth in India? Use indicators of income, health and education. (250 words)
2. Discuss the spatial pattern of female literacy in India in 2011 and the reasons for it. (150 words)
3. "Resources are not a neutral category." Examine this criticism of the Neo-Malthusian view of population and development. (150 words)

📦 Revision Capsule

Sources

• NCERT, India: People and Economy (Class XII), ch. 3 "Human Development", Tables 3.1-3.4 (2021-22 print; not in the 2026-27 reprint): 2021 book archive, Wayback copy; 2026-27 book archive.
• UNDP, Human Development Report 2025: A matter of choice: People and possibilities in the age of AI, Statistical Annex Tables 1 (HDI), 2 (HDI trends), 3 (IHDI), 4 (GDI) and 5 (GII): report page; HDR data centre.
• UNDP, Human Development Report 1990: report page.
• United Nations, Agenda 21, adopted at the UN Conference on Environment and Development, Rio de Janeiro, 3-14 June 1992: sdgs.un.org. E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (London: Blond & Briggs, 1973).
• UNDP and OPHI, Global Multidimensional Poverty Index 2025, Tables 1 and 2: HDR data centre.
• NITI Aayog, National Multidimensional Poverty Index: A Progress Review 2023, state table (p. 37): niti.gov.in PDF.
• Office of the Registrar General of India, Sample Registration System Statistical Report 2024: SRS_STAT_2024.pdf.
• Census of India 2011, Primary Census Abstract highlights, chapter 3 (literacy): Wayback copy; state literacy and child sex ratio computed from the final PCA State tables.