Empowering India through HDPlus strategy

Dr.  Devendra Kothari 

Population and Development Analyst

Forum for population Action

Though India has made extraordinary strides in the last couple of decades in reducing poverty, the country is still home to a very large number of the poor.  It is projected that India may experience an increase in number of poor in coming years, which calls for increased efforts to attend to the needs of the vulnerable, especially those in the bottom 50%.   According to the French Economists, Piketty and his colleague Chancel, “over fifty per cent of India’s population still has little or no access to basic facilities, such as quality education, health or sanitation even after the adoption of market-friendly strategies during the 1990s and record-high GDP growth in recent years.” [1] As such around 70 crore or 700 million out of the total population of 1350 million in 2018 can be classified as deprived or vanchit Indians. And, without empowering this population of 140 million families, India cannot resolve the issue of poverty, since   poverty is a feature of life only where people’s opportunities to overcome it are brutally limited.

Now question arises what holds India back from realising its potential, the best answer is its failure to develop its human capital. With the World Bank ranking India at 115th out of 157 countries on the Human Capital Index, India cannot avoid the issue of empowering people.  HCI seeks to measure the amount of human capital that a child born today can expect to attain by the age of 18. According to its parameters a child born in India today will only be 44% as productive as she could have been if she enjoyed quality education and full health as well as quality of living environment including water and sanitation.  In other words, there are grave deficiencies in our human development inputs that are preventing our children from reaching their full potential. Commenting on the poor quality of human development, Bill Gates and Ratan Tata rightly noted: “Human capital is one of India’s greatest assets. Yet, the world’s fastest growing economy hasn’t touched millions of Indian citizens at the bottom of the economic pyramid”.[2] For this, India has to empower its people by investing in their health, education, and physical living conditions. Our development slogan must be “Sattar Crore Vanchit   Bharatiya ka Vikas (Development of 700 million Deprived Indians).

What will it take to help these people to improve their potential? For this, a strategy has been developed and it is being christened as “HDPlus”.[3] It is based on a ‘whole child’ concept, that is child and his/her family should be the fulcrum of human development efforts. The concept is being described by policies, practices, and relationships which ensure that each child is healthy, educated, engaged, supported and encouraged. For this, integrating the child and his or her family more deeply into the day-to-day life of school and home activities represents an untapped instrument for raising the overall achievements including learning skills and health parameters, and hence improving overall productivity. In other words, creating an enabling environment at family and school levels is a way  to empower people.

Looking to the prevailing situation, HDPlus strategy will focus on five interventions in a more closely integrated form. They are:   Improving the quality of elementary education, Strengthening WASH factors (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene), Enhancing primary health, Reducing gender gap, and most importantly Stabilizing the population by minimizing incidents of unwanted childbearing incidences and bringing down infant mortality. In addition, we must recognize that shifting of excess labour from agriculture to non-agriculture sectors and managing climate change including the quality of air and water are important inputs in the process of human development.

HDPlus strategy is based on Amartya Sen's capabilities approach which revolves around people as human being; it sees development as expansion of people's capabilities – it is an enabling (empowering) preposition. It aims to enhance people's well-being by expanding their capabilities which is connected to freedom of choices. The main features of HDPlus strategy are:

1.           The focus of action will be all school-going children, aged 6 to 14, in government schools and their families (HDPlus families).
2.      The focal point of various governments’ pro-poor schemes along with HD interventions will be HDPlus families.
3.      The framework will be implemented by government agencies in collaboration with civil organizations.  

The figure below shows as to how HDPlus strategy will lay foundation for human competency in empowering people. It will focus on   children aged 6-14 attending   local Government primary schools and their families to be known as HDPlus   families.  The identified families will be   focal point of various governments’ pro-poor schemes along with selected HD interventions like education, water, sanitation, primary and reproductive health, etc. This will result in the human competency that is quality of being adequately or well qualified physically and intellectually. The strategy will  ensure that 14 year olds (8^th graders) is well prepared to read, write and be efficient in maths as well as in digital technology before moving to higher education.

The above analysis reveals that HDPlus strategy rests on the assumption that people, when given tools and opportunity, can defy the odds. “This is especially true of young people, because they are determined to lead a better life than their parents have and eager to follow new ideas and new technologies where they lead,” as noted by Bill and Melinda Gates.  [4] The policy makers, civil society, donor agencies and international partners, therefore, should scale up advocacy and mobilise support for key interventions that would not only empower people by enhancing productivity but will also help in accelerating the process of achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Slow progress towards HD is indeed everybody’s problem and must be treated as a national emergency!

Courtesy: Prof.LK Kothari 

---

[1] Chancel, Lucas and Thomas Piketty. 2017.  “Indian income inequality, 1922-2014: From British Raj to Billionaire Raj?”  WID, World Working Paper Series No. 2017/11, World Inequality Lab, Paris School of Economics.  Also refer at: http://wid.world/document/chancelpiketty2017widworld/

[2] Gates, Bill and Ratan Tata. 2016. “New nutrition report underscores the importance of leadership in addressing stunting in India” at:https://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/toi-editorials/new-nutrition-report-underscores-the-importance-of-leadership-in-addressing-stunting-in-india.

 [3] Kothari, Devendra. 2019. Nurturing Human Development: A Strategy for New India, New Delhi: Paragoan International Publishers.

[4] Gates, Bill and Melinda. 2018. “Our Precarious Progress on Poverty”, The New York Times, Sunday Review, Sept. 23, 2018.