Fixed within templates, the World Bank’s human capital index has yielded an incomplete and pre-determined picture
The World Bank and IMF have been known to be biased against developing countries, India included, to justify the West’s agenda of ensuring superiority in the area that’s a tougher challenge for us vis-a-vis them. That happens to be human resource development, handicapped as we, like China, are by huge populations. Justifiably, therefore, India has rejected the World Bank’s latest survey of the Human Capital Index, which ranks India at 115 among 157 countries, pushing us back behind development indices of our neighbours like Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, some of whom have received development aid from us too. The index seeks to measure the amount of human capital that a child born today can expect when he/she turns 18. The Government claims that the report did not take into account several key initiatives undertaken for developing human capital, like those for the girl child, education and the now much talked about Ayushman Bharat. Besides, comparatives hold only when there is a fair, inclusive manner of data collection and analytics. Existing and fixed templates would but naturally yield an incomplete and pre-determined picture. Agreed that some of these schemes have just taken off the ground and perhaps wouldn’t register high transformative impact in statistical terms yet. That doesn’t mean that they would be completely written off either. Taken individually, each of our schemes covers a population arc so wide-ranging that many in the Western world too would not attempt to emulate. For example, the Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan aims at providing access and quality of education for the benefit of 197 million school children. The Ayushman Bharat programme is now officially the world’s largest health insurance initiative, providing 500 million citizens with adequate health coverage. About 38 million women have been covered under the Ujjwala scheme and according to the government, the account ownership among rural adults has more than doubled from 33 per cent in 2011 to 79 per cent in 2017, significantly bridging the rural-urban gap after the Aadhar and Jan Dhan schemes.
And though the World Bank has earlier acknowledged poverty reduction in India, it is true that it is yet to benefit all segments of the population equally primarily because we are still chasing targets of inclusive growth. That’s what is stunting consumption graph. The only takeaway of the report is that it argues for increased health and education outlays. This is a shift from the World Bank’s own frequent emphasis on infrastructure as a marker for development. The IMF, in fact, has historically limited public spending as a condition of its loan packages, considering human resource development has a longer gestation period of deliverables. Question is whether the bank itself, still fuelled by Western funding, is ready to reframe its outlook vis-a-vis developing countries?