Geography 3 Marks Question

Health: The indicator chosen to assess health is the life expectancy at birth. A higher life expectancy means that people have a greater chance of living longer and healthier lives.
Education: The adult literacy rate and the gross enrolment ratio represent access to knowledge. The number of adults, who are able to read and write and the number r of children enrolled in schools show how easy or difficult it is to access knowledge in a particular country,
Access to resources: It is measured in terms of purchasing power (in U.S. dollars). Each of these dimensions is given a weight age of 1/3. The human development index is a sum total of the weights assigned to all these dimensions.

The size of the territory and per capita income are not directly related to human development:
Often smaller countries have done better than larger ones in human development. Similarly, relatively poorer nations have been ranked higher than richer neighbours in terms of human development.
For example Sri Lanka, Trinidad and Tobago have a higher rank than India in the human development index despite having smaller economies. Similarly, within India, Kerala performs much better than Punjab and Gujarat in human development despite having lower per capita income

Size of the territory and per capita income are not directly related to human development. Often small countries have done better than larger ones in human development. Similarly, relatively poorer nations have been ranked higher than richer neighbours in terms of human development.
Example: Sri Lanka, Trinidad and Tobago have a higher rank than India in the human development index despite having smaller economies.

The pattern of government expenditure on social sector is an important indicator of the level of human development in a particular region. The political environment of the country and the amount of freedom people have is also important. Countries with high levels of human development invest more in the social sectors and are generally free from political turmoil and instability. Distribution of the country’s resources is also far more equitable.
On the other hand, places with low levels of human development tend to spend more on defense rather than social sectors. This shows that these countries tend to be located in areas of political instability and have not been able to initiate accelerated economic development.

Very often, people do not have the capability and freedom to make even basic choices. This may be due to their inability to acquire knowledge, their material poverty, social discrimination, inefficiency of institutions and other reasons. This prevents them from leading healthy lives being able to get educated or to have the means to live a decent life. Building people’s capabilities in the areas of health, education and access to resources is therefore, important in enlarging their choices. If people do not have capabilities in these areas, their choices also get limited. For example, an uneducated child cannot make the choice to be a doctor because her choice has got limited by her lack of education. Similarly, very often poor people cannot choose to take medical treatment for disease because their choice is limited by their lack of resources

The Human Development Index ranks the countries based on their performance in the key areas of health, education and access to resources. These ranking are based on a score between 0 to 1, that a country earns from it record in the key areas of human development. Each of these dimensions is given a weightage of 1 / 3. The HDI is the sum total of the weights assigned to all these dimensions. The closer a score is to 1, the greater is the level of human development.

Countries can be classified into four categories on the basis of human development index as :

HDI	Number of countries	Score in Development
		Index
Very High Human Development	49	> 0.808
High Human Development	53	0.700 up to 0.807
Medium human development	42	0.556 up to 0.699
Low human development	43	< 0.555