PMO Report Card: How India’s Development Slowed Down Under Modi’s Watch
In 2014, the slogan everyone heard was Vikas (Development). Though India continued to develop at a certain pace, people disillusioned with the previous regime voted with a lot of hope for a new administration and thought of making a new beginning.
They believed that a new government would accelerate the growth of the Nation and improve well-being faster. But, did the new regime fulfill the hope, promise, and expectations? I have tried to deep dive into some of these.
Development
Vikas (National Development) does not mean a few infrastructures or range of promises or some tactical steps as commonly believed. Vikas means a development in terms of the social and economic wellbeing of the people. The closest measure of development is a composite index called Human Development Index (HDI).
The Human Development Index is a composite index of life expectancy, education, and per capita income indicators, used to rank countries into four tiers of human development. The origins of the HDI are found in the annual Human Development Reports produced by the Human Development Report Office of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
HDI Trends of India
HDI has two types of trends. One is ranking where the UN ranks countries on the basis of HDI score. Since the number of countries keeps changing and it is just a comparative score, I have avoided ranking. The right metric is the score itself.
India has been a developing nation for a very long time, and its HDI index has continuously been increasing. It is true for most countries in the world. To understand the changes, I have tried to see the yearly rate of this change across various intervals. Here is the United Nations HDI-related data.
If we look at the yearly rate of change in HDI across various intervals, it has shown positive growth, but you can see something has changed since 2014.
First, the annual rate of growth came down to 0.008 and then slowed down to 0.002. As a result, the average yearly growth rate from 2014 is 0.005, half the annual rate of change between 2010 and 2014.
This trend indicates India’s progress not only stalled but slowed down further. But, unfortunately, no mainstream media has explored this decline. The metrics like GDP Growth and Hunger Index also corroborate the indication of a slowdown in Development.
Conclusion
Failure to keep pace with HDI improvement indicates somewhere people are not the priority. Health, Happiness, Prosperity, and Knowledge are what people expect from any government. Modi has failed to drive happiness, and the composite metrics of health, prosperity, and education are also indicating a massive failure.
