Human development

THE CONCEPT of human development has undoubtedly become an important part of the contemporary landscape of development thinking, in spite of the avoidable trivia and platitude that are strewn around to rationalise the concept by the Human Development Reports published annually by the United Nations Development Programme. Hardly anyone would deny that we needed a concept that would serve to integrate a variety of concerns about the lives of people and their well-being. What is more important is that complementary efforts must be made to obtain detailed information on various aspects of human development at the national and regional levels. The South India Human Development Report is the result of such an effort. The research team of the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) should be commended for bringing out this valuable compendium of data on human development in four Southern States - Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu.

To develop the human development profile for each state, the report has put together essentially three kinds of information: secondary data from various sources, primary data collected by the NACER itself through a household survey in 1994, and an intensive study of two villages using the qualitative research methods. The strength of the report particularly lies in the chapters based on the NCAER survey and the village studies. Interesting inter-relations among various household and individual attributes can be meaningfully studied through sample surveys. The correspondence between household income and literacy, for example, is not uniform across the states. In general, whereas the higher income groups show little variation across states in terms of some of the basic indicators of human development, the lower income groups are much more diverse. The nature of diversity is further complicated by the observations from the village studies. To give an example, in the two villages selected from Tamil Nadu, villagers with the same level of literacy (or illiteracy) show very different degrees of awareness about illnesses and their symptoms.

To an informed reader, however, the chapters based on secondary data would perhaps seem less interesting than others, primarily because the data furnished in these chapters correspond to the early 1990s. Based on dated information, the report observes, for example, that Kerala is "characterised by the existence of a good quality of life with an almost stagnating economy''. Had it taken into account the 1990s as a whole, it would have surely observed that the rate of growth of Kerala's per captia state domestic product in the 1990s was comparable to the all-India average. It is, however, an altogether different matter that much of it is attributable to the growth in the services sector. Even with dated information an attempt could be made to provide a comparative analysis of the overall human development achievements of the states. There are a great many things that we can learn from comparative analyses. Overall, south India may be considered as a relatively advanced part of the country, in terms of many of the indicators used in the report. This must not conceal the fact that Andhra Pradesh - the largest of the four states - is in some respects much closer to the large North Indian States than to Kerala or Tamil Nadu. In a report of this kind one would expect a bit more than mere description of the data tables reproduced from such sources as the Census or the CMIE. This deficiency, however, does not diminish the value of the report, given the other kinds of information taken together.

In India, there is a strong tradition of open debate and discussion on data issues among academicians and officials. The gap between what the experts know and common usage of statistics has often contributed to oversimplified analysis of policy issues. The first step towards bridging this gap is an appreciation of the extensive data already available in various forms. The report will surely contribute to this.

ACHIN CHAKRABORTY

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