Human Development Progress in India: Population, Urbanization, and Education, Study notes of Business Accounting

Download Human Development Progress in India: Population, Urbanization, and Education and more Study notes Business Accounting in PDF only on Docsity! PROGRESS OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT IN INDIA The basic purpose of planning in India is to widen people’s choices and improve the well being of the people. In this context, human development was the key issue so that people could lead a long and healthy life, they could acquire knowledge so as to have a better vertical mobility in life and last, but not the least, to achieve a decent standard of living of all. It would be, therefore, appropriate to examine the progress of human development in India. India has been categorized by the Human Development Report 2001 as a medium human development country. The human Development Index has risen gradually from 0.406 in 1975 to 0.510 in 1990 and stands at 0.590 in 2001. In fact, it can take quite long for India to cross the mark of 0.8 in HDI to join the rank of high HDI countries. A major impediment to progress in human development is the very fast growth of population experienced in India. India’s population increases from 620.7 million in 1975 to 1,033 million in 2001 giving a growth rate of 20 % per annum during the period (1975-2001), which is fairly high. It is expected that the growth rate of population during 2000-2015 will come down to 1.3 %. This would provide a welcome relief to push forward the process of human development. Urbanization is considered to be a factor, which promotes human development. The share of urban population, which was 21.3 % in 1975, has reached a level of 27.8 %in 2001,but by 2015, urban population would reach the level of 32.2 %. This would certainly help to enlarge human development because it has been observed that urban areas are better looked after in terms of education and 76 health facilities. Another healthy feature of likely demographic transition is the proportion of children or population under age 15, whose proportion stood at 33.7 % in 2001 but likely to decline to 27.7 % by 2015. This will imply decreasing population pressures far below in future which would also help in releasing resources to improve human development. It would be quite useful to consider factors related with the education of the population that art likely to promote human development. The most important factor is adult literacy rate, which was 58 % in 2001. The share of India in the world’s illiterate population is 33.3 % .The information technology revolution has been necessitated an increase in proportion of tertiary students in science, math and engineering to be steeped up. Their proportion was only 25% during 1994-97 in India. India has to bring about a shift to meet the challenging demands of the new economy.