Human Development Index:

The Human  Development Index  (HDI) was  developed  in  1990 on  the initiative of noted  economist Mahbub  ul  Haq  and  has  been  in  use  since  1993 by  the United Nations  Development Programme  (UNDP)  in  its  Human  Development Report. Based on various indicators,  HDI  is constructed and  ranking of countries is done on a scale of 0 (zero) to 1  (one). Zero signifies the lowest human development while one signifies highest human development. Three main  factors considered in  construction of HDI  are:

i)  longevity  as measured  by  life  expectuncy at birth; 

ii) knowledge as measured  by  a weighted average of adzllt  literacy (with two-third weight) and  gross enrolment ratio at the primary, secondary and  tertiary levels of education (with one- third  weight); and 

iii)  and  standard  of  living  as  measured  by  per  capita GDP expressed  in  purchasing power  parity  (US$).

The ad-justment by  purchasing power parity  is made  in  order to compare the cost of living across countries. Countries are ranked  according  to  their  HDI  and then  divided  into  three groups:  low  human development (0.0  to  0.499), medium  human  development (0.50 to 0.799) and high human  development (0.80 to  1.0). In  the list of countries  Norway tops  with an HDI of  0.965 for the year   2005.  The  top five  countries  in  order  of  HDI  are Norway, Iceland, Australia, Ireland, and Sweden. India is considered at the medium level with an HDI  index of 0.611 and  ranks 126"' in  the list of  177  countries.

HDI  indicates the status of  the three ma-jor components which  the countries  can improve to better their ranking, It brings out the disparities in  the indicators of health and  education as well as general living standards. It has been observed that countries with  similar  GNP per capita can have  different human  development  indicator depending on  how  that  income  is used  to develop human welfare. In recent reports HDI is disaggregated  for  men  and  women,  different social classes  and  differen regions and ethnic groups.