Human rights and human development

THE SPECIAL FEATURE of the 2000 edition of the Human Development Report (HDR) of the United Nations Development Programme is not the mass of statistics on the various human development indices, which tells us little more than what is already known about the situation in India and other countries, but in the unusual attempt to combine the two distinct concepts of human rights and human development.

The idea of human development as developed in successive HDRs has come to mean an expansion of people's capabilities - the freedom to do the kind of things that an individual may value and the simultaneous ability to live a long, healthy and productive life. On the other hand, human rights - in their broadest meaning covering political, economic, gender, social, civic and minority guarantees - have meant securing for all people the right to live a life of dignity. As the HDR points out, the concept of human rights was for decades the subject of polarised debate. During the Cold War, the capitalist societies tended to highlight the absence of democratic rights in the socialist societies, while the latter focussed on the lack of fulfilment of universal economic and social rights in the market economies. More recently, the Governments of developing countries have often chosen to argue that human rights come after and not before economic development. The report stresses instead that distinct as they are and running in parallel as they may be, the two reinforce each other: human development is essential for human rights and human rights are essential for human development. For example, the adoption by a society of the right to education gives a certain moral legitimacy to campaigns to increase levels of literacy - which is an essential component of human development. And human development by expanding the fund of available economic resources makes it possible for a Government to set up schools and pay salaries for teachers that are necessary to fulfil the right to education. This is only one example of how human rights and human development are mutually supportive and not exclusive as often made out to be. The policy implication of this analytical linkage between the two is self- evident - neither can be considered in isolation of the other and one cannot be either provided or advanced without the other.

While the HDR highlights the substantial progress that has been made globally in the past century in the expansion of human rights and the advancement of human development, it also stresses that the unfinished tasks are many and enormous. Consider the presence of political rights. More people than ever before may now be electing their representatives in government, but the presence of parliamentary democracy does not mean the absence of widespread discrimination against regional and ethnic minorities. Nor does the presence of political rights at one time preclude their abrogation later as have been witnessed over the past year in Pakistan and Fiji. Moreover, while the number of countries ratifying the basic human rights covenants increased dramatically during the 1990s, the experience in most countries has been that mere ratification does not lead to guaranteed enforcement. Similarly, in human development, the global proportion of people living in poverty may have fallen during the 1990s, but 20 per cent of the world's population still lives in income poverty and 40 per cent does not have access to basic sanitation. Moreover, even as the world economy as a whole has been expanding, the inequalities between countries are perhaps larger now than ever before in human history. It is just as well that one of the main observations of the 2000 HDR is that ``poverty eradication is not only a development goal, it is a central challenge for human rights in the 21st century.''

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