<b>T N Ninan: </b>Good and bad, even ugly

While India's human development index has improved, absolute performance levels aren't satisfactory

The Human Development Report (HDR) that was published recently by the United Nations Development Programme gave India high marks and low. It is important that the country take note of both. The good news is that India has performed much better than average when it comes to the rate of improvement on its Human Development Index — which is a composite of life expectancy, years of schooling and per capita income. Among the large economies, only China did better. India’s index has improved by about 46 per cent since 1990 — an annual rate of improvement of 1.52 per cent.