India needs better metric for Human Capital Index: Economic Affairs Secretary

“HCI uses metric of industrial era to measure the status of human capital for digital age and its production system. He (Garg) said that a better metric is needed,” a Finance Ministry statement on Saturday quoted Garg, who led the Indian delegation at the IMF summit at Bali.

Speaking at the International Monetary Fund’s Development Committee Lunch Session on Friday, Garg asserted that there is a need to recognise that the digital technological changes taking place are more fundamental than even the invention of the steam engine, which had laid the foundation of the industrial revolution.

“There is a digital revolution which is transforming the world... (and) Human Capital needs to continuously evolve and develop,” he said at the session that focused on World Development Report on the changing nature of work, as per the ministry’s statement.

The World Bank’s inaugural HCI has placed India at 115 out of 157 countries in terms of the quality of human capital based on five parameters - child survival, school enrolment, quality of learning, healthy growth and adult survival.

India’s HCI score is 0.44, which means a child born in the country today will be only 44 per cent as productive “when she grows up as she could be if she enjoyed complete education and full health”. This puts India even lower than most of its neighbours in South Asia (HCI 0.46).