India looks at devising own standards to assess socio-economic progress
- June 11, 2023
- Posted by: OptimizeIAS Team
- Category: DPN Topics
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India looks at devising own standards to assess socio-economic progress
Subject : Schemes
Concept :
- Release of a working paper titled “Re-examining the estimates of India’s development indicators by international organizations” by the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister.
Introduction:
- The Union Government has discarded the one-size-fits-all international data parameters used to measure the socioeconomic progress of the country. It has proposed to devise its own strategy.
- However, health activists are divided on this move of the Government.
- One group favours international norms as aspirational standards.
- While others support the government’s decision.
Details:
- India is redrawing its assessment approach to accommodate its national diversity and local anthropometric measurements.
- In March 2023, the Union Health Ministry released its own mechanism for estimating the tuberculosis burden in India.
- India has also questioned the WHO’s mathematical modelling for COVID-19 deaths estimation and called it “unscientific”.
- India has dropped questions relating to anaemia and disability from the National Family Health Survey-6 (NFHS).
- It is suggested that the three widely used development indicators (child stunting, female labour force participation rate, and life expectancy at birth) often present a misleading picture of overall development.
- Experts highlight that improper adjustments using modelling procedures end up skewing data for India. For example, the United Nations Population Division sharply reduced the estimates for calculating life expectancy at birth for India from 70.19 in 2019 to 67.24 in 2021.
- It is also said that the growing use of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) norms in investment and trade decisions increases the need for accurate data.
- It is pointed out that the issue of misappropriation is well-known in the medical field and countries like the U.S., U.K., and Indonesia have developed their own growth chart for reference by medical practitioners.
- There is a growing concern about the universal applicability of these standards leading some countries to adopt their own country-specific growth benchmarks.
- It is suggested by some health experts that utilizing the WHO 2006 standards results in overestimating stunting and wasting cases in India.
- Currently, using these standards would translate into approximately 10 million and 12 million more children being classified as stunted and wasted.
- The overall data from 21 developing countries demonstrated that the prevalence of severe wasting in infants under six months increased by 3.5 times, whereas severe child wasting increased by 1.7 times after applying the WHO standard.
Social Progress Index
- The Social Progress Index is published by a non-profit entity called Social Progress Imperative, which is based out of the United States of America (USA).
- Social Progress Index ranks the social performance of 149 countries over 51 different indicators.
- In this Index, the social performance of a country is assessed independently of economic factors. The index is primarily based on social and environmental indicators capturing 3 major dimensions of social progress. The 3 dimensions are listed below.
- Opportunity
- Foundations of Well Being
- Basic Human Needs
- India scored 56.80 out of 100 in Social Progress Index 2020; with a rank of 117 among 163 nations.