HUMAN DEVELOPMENT INDEX AND INEQUALITY ADJUSTED HUMAN DEVELOPMENT INDEX OF SELECTED SOUTH ASIAN COUNTRIES

Enlarging people’s choice and enhancing human capabilities” – the well-known definition propoundedby Human Development report (HDR) 1990 – led the path for many economists and researchers to turnthe lime light on and foray in this direction against predefined notions of economic development andgrowth. Human development eventually has become a broader and more acceptable concept. Since then,tremendous amount of work has been done in this direction for countries across world. However, suchindices for South Asian countries exclusively and comparison therein has remained unattended. Thepresent paper intends to evaluate the human development indices and three key dimension of humandevelopment – health, literacy and income. In 2010, HDR, UNDP, proposed the Inequality AdjustedHuman Development Index1 which tried to gauge the subgroup inequality. The Atkinson InequalityIndex2 was used to work out subgroup inequality and to arrive at Inequality Adjusted Humandevelopment Index (IHDI). Infact, it was later realised that human development without measuringsubgroup inequality would mask reality.The present paper is predominantly conceived to understand performance of India vis. a vis. other SouthAsian countries on human development dynamics. Each parameter is carefully analysed to ameliorateunderstanding of parameters and their impact on human development. The outcome of study is- humandevelopment dynamics and human capabilities measurement is redundant and meaningless unless theinequality in each parameter is premeditated which will in turn enhance the understanding.