Editorial: Time for human action

CHENNAI: Despite sustained improvements in human development, India continues to be stuck in the medium category with an unenviable ranking of 130 (as against 133 the previous year).

The country is slowly moving towards the high human development category (ranking of 75 to 124) according to UNDP’s 2025 Human Development Report. But it is going to be a long and tortuous journey given the continuing mismatch between an impressive economic growth record and continuing to languish in the “medium” human development category.

Unemployment and the widening chasm of inequality is dragging India into a morass of skewed development. Since the liberalisation in 1991, successive governments drew up plans and mobilised resources to improve human development.

As a result, India’s HDI value has increased by over 53% since 1990, growing faster than both the global and South Asian averages. Credit should be given to the visionary leadership of Manmohan Singh government which first advocated and implemented “economic reforms with a human face” – that is, balancing economic growth and social welfare and justice. Studies have shown that in the recent years, the equilibrium seems to be shifting more towards economic growth despite claims to the contrary of intent and action.

The setbacks were due to the debilitating impact of policies like demonetisation, in hindsight misguided, and the subsequent Covid-19 pandemic. Demonetisation slowed down the economy and adversely impacted job-generating MSMEs and the informal sectors. Covid-19 too disrupted the economy and there’s some validity in criticisms of policy and governance failure.

Case in point is the under-reporting of deaths and losses now proved by Registrar General of India’s data. The setbacks were somewhat reversed by implementing programmes the National Rural Health Mission, Ayushman Bharat, Janani Suraksha Yojana, and Poshan Abhiyaan with renewed vigour. This has yielded tangible and substantial results by increasing life expectancy to the highest levels – from 58.6 years in 1990 to 72 years in 2023, which helped move India up in HDI.

Two, another culprit is the lethal combination of high youth unemployment rate which robs the country of the so-called demographic dividend, low labour participation rate and 40 per cent of workers trapped in the ailing agriculture sector.

That partly explains the increasing inequality and the benefits of economic growth not trickling down and thus not improving the HDI. The impact of the jobless growth model was not adequately addressed or compensated by the earlier generation initiatives such as MNREGA or the more recent programmes such as Jan Dhan Yojana and over 300 Direct Benefit Transfer schemes.

Already reeling under the impact of a jobless growth model, the government needs to understand if and how AI would further worsen the employment scenario. The HDR report titled ‘A Matter of Choice: People and Possibilities in the Age of AI’ is gung-ho about higher AI skills penetration and being better retention of Indian AI talent which could develop home-grown AI models and applications to address complex challenges in agriculture, healthcare and education. Will AI be a boon or bane, as the cliché goes, depends as much on government policy as on seismic technology changes.

India needs to get its act together to march into high human development category that too in the face of looming threats of slowdown and recession due to trade tariff wars and fragile peace and stability in south Asian region.