I think Bangladesh have done wonders in this regard, For a relatively new nation, Pakistan, India and Ceylon all have been independent for nearly 70 years now, Bangladesh also have been in political, Economic and environmental turmoil for most art of it's life..They were indeed bottom of the rut.. So respect where it's due
India is indeed vast and too complex.. There are few pockets of the first world within India but by large despite huge economic gains, There is something really lacking in terms of tackling the standard of living for the vast majority of it's population, The fact that India has regressed from the 100th position to 105 should be a cause for worry for the policy makers
Sri Lanka's success story has few fronts.. One it always had a decent standard of living even during the colonial period, It was one of the most prosperous and stable British colonies prior to independence with highly educated population and very few social issues like caste and ethnic discrimination which leads to inequality to start with, Also with independence successive government made HCI a priority, Universal Education (Free for all including tertiary/Uni) and Universal Health care make Sri Lankans on par with the developed world in those aspects.
And it's a small nation compared to vastness of India, So implementation of policies are easier
Bro,
Just a little bit of info:
The nature of the ranking change from 100 to 105 was more to do with more countries being introduced into the index this year from the last. Many countries will be brought in in following years as data becomes available. We cannot compare rankings from year to year unless the set of countries stays the same from year to year.
In fact the index improved for India.
Now coming to the index details....the basic problem (for me) is the fact this is an "invisible" composite index.
For me such indices have a major problem similar to "too many cooks spoil the broth". This is especially true when no information is provided as to what the weights are for the components (and sub components) of the index are. At least for the HDI, income, health and education are explained as equally weighted (and thus we can then take a debate from there as to whether development should really be measured in that way etc..)
I looked deeper at the human capital index pages for South Asia (which I doubt many members commenting and chest-thumping here and in other threads have done) and what struck me is that the quality of education is perceived as much better in India (in Maths, Science especially) compared to say Bangladesh, the availability, quality and prevalence of skilled manpower is much higher and India scores a lot higher in economic complexity of its human capital. Where India lags is the labour participation rate of its women. While its true this often has benefits for a country's human capital depth and sustainability in general....there are many hidden things that overlooked when women are not part of the official workforce....such as the benefit they bring to family cohesion, the economic value of their housework, participation in unofficial (but paid) work based around rather than instead of their family commitments etc etc. It is not a clear cut situation and analysis that women working officially (without much context regarding their work quality, productivity and hours and conditions etc) = human capital improvement overall for a society...especially one where you can weight it so heavily (and not indicate how heavily you weight it so it can be debated).
I mean lets look at another composite index:
http://www.livemint.com/Politics/aq...ces-in-World-Banks-logistics-performance.html
http://lpi.worldbank.org/international/global
According to this index, India has better logistics than many developed countries like Iceland, New Zealand and Portugal.
Thats the fundamental flaw with the composite index approach.
I would rather compare individual basic metric one by one rather than lumping them all together and assigning some arbritary weight/ calculation and not even showing what those weights and calculations are.
Econometrics and economic and social development is much too complicated to be measured on just composite indices. Rather they may give a false sense of security to many countries that they are doing enough....because of weighting mathemagic rather than fundamental quality change of individual parameters that really matter (like education quality).
