Know All About Human Development Report 2020

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Human Development Report 2020 released by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).

Theme : The Next Frontier: Human Development and the Anthropocene.
The first HDR was launched in 1990 by the Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq and Indian Nobel laureate Amartya Sen.

Human Development Index (HDI)

Every year UNDP ranks countries based on the HDI report released in their annual report. The HDI measures average achievement in three basic dimensions of human development — life expectancy, education, and per capita income.

The 2010 Human Development Report introduced three new indices that address crucial development factors not directly reflected in the HDI:

The Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI)
The Gender Inequality Index (GII)
The Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI)

What’s new in HDR 2020

The 2020 report asserts that immense human pressures on the planet have ushered in a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, or the Age of Humans.
The report introduces a new index to account for these pressures, the Planetary-Pressures Adjusted Human Development Index (PHDI), which includes a country’s carbon dioxide emissions and material footprint.
The GSNI is a social norms index. It captures how social beliefs can obstruct gender equality along four dimensions: political, educational, economic and physical integrity. Overall, the GSNI reflects how prevalent are biases from social norms in these dimensions as well as how are they evolving.

Countries Ranking in HDI 2020

HDI 2020 ranks countries on 2019 data, similarly HDI 2019 ranks countries on 2018 data.

Norway topped the index, followed by Ireland and Switzerland.
India ranks 131 of 189 countries on the Human Development Index (HDI).(India’s rank in HDI 2019 was 129).
India’s gross national income (GNI) per capita fell to $6,681 in 2019 from $6,829 in 2018 on PPP basis.
Among Asian economies, Singapore was ranked 11, Saudi Arabia (40), and Malaysia was ranked 62 and were placed among the top bracket with “very high human development”.
Countries like Sri Lanka (72), Thailand (79), China (85) and Indonesia and Philippines (both 107) and Vietnam (117) with many others were tagged as “high human development” countries.
India, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Nepal, Cambodia, Kenya, and Pakistan were ranked under countries with medium human development with a rank in between 120 and 156 among the 189-counties.

In the BRICS economic grouping, Russia was 52 in the human development index, Brazil was placed at 84, China was ranked 85, beside India’s lowly 131 rank.
India’s HDI value for 2019 is 0.645 — which put the country in the medium human development category — positioning it at 131 out of 189 countries and territories. Between 1990 and 2019, India’s HDI value increased from 0.429 to 0.645, an increase of 50.3 percent.