Dec 28, 2010: “India is witnessing phenomenal economic growth, but for the overall development of the country, efforts also should be made to improve the human development index,’’ said deputy chairman of the planning commission, Montek Singh Ahluwalia.
He was in the city on Monday to receive the 8th Sant Namdev National Award instituted by city-based non-governmental organisation, Sarhad. Ahluwalia donated the award of Rs1 lakh to Sarhad and a Sikh organisation in Chandigarh working for underprivileged children and rendered a few lines in Marathi.
He said, “I’m fortunate to receive this award. My daughter-in-law is a Maharashtrian and hence I have a special connection with this land of saints,’’ he said.
Sant Namdev’s 61 verses are included in the Guru Granth Sahib. Sant Namdev travelled to Punjab roughly 700 years ago and stayed there for 20 years.
“The saints of our country had a broad vision of Indian culture, tradition and customs. Guru Nanak also had travelled to eastern part of the countries and even to Baghdad,’’ said Ahluwalia.
Union power minister Sushil Kumar Shinde said India’s capacity to generate 45,000 MW was because of efforts made by Ahluwalia and prime minister Manmohan Singh. “We need to build up wealth to reduce poverty, Ahluwalia and the PM are taking firm steps in the direction of growth,” he said.
Harmindersingh Ghai, Jagdish Bajaj, RS Khanna, Swansingh Virk and Rawail Singh were given the Sant Namdev Lifetime Achievement awards. Virk and Rawail Singh couldn’t make it to the function.
-----------------------------------------------Human Development Index: What it means?
In 2000, the United Nations declared eight “Millennium Development Goals” (MDG) to be achieved by 2015 or 2020 according to measurable targets and defined indicators:
The measurement of development and of the progress of development is a difficult and complex problem, given the many aspects of development as cited above. Some aspects of the measurement include:
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* National GDP
* Literacy rates
* Life expectancy
* Infant mortality rates
* Gini coefficient
* HIV infection rates
* Number of doctors per capita
* Freedom scores
* Governance scores
* Number of PhD’s
* Number of newspapers or other publications
* etc.
While each component of development is relatively easy to measure (given adequate national statistics), their aggregation and relative weighting is complex and controversial. Hence it is difficult to measure a country’s overall development rate. A simplified and widely accepted overall measurement is the “Human Development Index” (HDI). The HDI combines measures of life expectancy, literacy, educational attainment, and GDP per capita for countries, so only 4 of several possible development measures, which is why some have called the HDI a “crude” measurement. The index was developed in 1990 by Mahbub ul Haq, Sir Richard Jolly, Gustav Ranis and Lord Meghnad Desai.
The following 2 graphs show the HDI in 2002 and 2007:
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