Measuring Sustainable Human Development: Method and Application

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Index (HDI) is an important tool for measuring progress of a country beyond the narrow boundaries of macroeconomic growth, but does not include issues of sustainability as envisaged in the Sustainable Development Goals framework. In this article, we seek to expand the conventional human development paradigm to sustainable human development and prepare an index for its measurement. It can be used as a baseline to monitor progress at the sub-national level and bring out spatially and temporally comparable sustainable HDIs for the states of India. Our results suggest that Indian states with high conventional HDI do not necessarily score high on the sustainability front, and hence the gains may only be transient. A temporal comparison between the pre- and post-COVID periods indicates that the health situation took a hit during the pandemic. Horizontal imbalance across the domains of sustainable human development also points to unbalanced development in the country. A strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) analysis was carried out and is expected to provide policy directions at the state level.